> it was brought to the ER initially with fractures in the right side of the skull.

Just to defuse this a bit. My #4 used to collect skull fractures. He'd slip away in a nanosecond and would be 50' above us two heartbeats later. We put him in a padded helmet for a year or so. It stayed on sometimes.

As an adult he can still disappear in an empty room.

I did not know this detail, I know the Danish state offered apologies, the charges were dropped and the child was returned to the parents.

Yeah, nobody know the exact parts of the case. As its semi-secret (to protect the child and parents I guess). While the parents were cleared, this case is definitely not appropriate to this discussion as it was definitely not only hemorrhaging that started it. If a hospital gets a toddler with fractures on their skull, society should damn well figure out how it got them and stop it from happening again.

As a toddler, my daughter fell out of her bed from a height of less than 18 inches and broke her collar-bone. It seems plausible to me that if she had landed on her head rather than her shoulder, she could have fractured her skull. I'm not sure that society needs to be in the business of preventing all falls from such a small height!

> If a hospital gets a toddler with fractures on their skull, society should damn well figure out how it got them and stop it from happening again.

What a leap (the kind the article is calling out by the way). Do you really think all causes for toddler skull fractures are a societal problem?

I do.

If a child has a serious injury the circumstances should be examined, as it should be quite rare for children to have serious injuries.

That's why places have Child Death and Serious Injury Review Committees.

So in order to form an informed opinion we have to figure out the relative costs and benefits of various options. Lets start by examining assumptions. Here we have

Fractures among children: incidence and impact on daily activities

https://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/4/3/194

wherein we discover that kids 0-12 break bones at an incidence of 128 per 10,000. Over 12 years that's more like 1536 or about 15% of kids if injuries were evenly distributed, although they probably aren't. Still in the right ballpark.

So serious injuries among kids are incredibly common.

If we launch investigations and get it right 95% of the time we will none the less fuck up millions of kids lives. We would probably be better off selectively investigating when there is at least some reason to believe something is afoot instead of every injury.

First things first - 85% of the fractures you're talking about are arm and leg fractures. Skull fractures, which was what I was talking about, are a significantly smaller number.

But yes, we should investigate why the child broke their arm. Does that need to be an in-depth investigation? Not usually. But it's important to understand why these things happen; that's where the data for the study you cited comes from.

I fully understand where you are coming from, but have you had a toddler?