My two-year old son has very weak front teeth with some visible plaque and chipping. It’s not decay and he rarely drinks juice or eats sugary food. My husband and I consulted dentists in Germany and the US and they both said that his teeth never calcified properly while he was in utero and that it was most likely the result of something that happened in the fourth or fifth month of pregnancy when the buds were forming, probably an illness I had.
When I was five months’ pregnant I rushed over to a 3D ultrasound place to learn my baby’s sex a couple of weeks before my OBGyn was able to schedule the regular sonogram. We got a little DVD set to music and phenomenal pictures in which you can really see his features. My husband says there’s nothing to feel guilty about but I keep wondering if that powerful sonogram damaged my son’s budding teeth, and I would never have one again. That’s the only thing I can remember happening during that time of my pregnancy.
Thanks for reading my rambling story, but the moral is that ultrasounds can damage tiny fetuses in unpredictable ways, and there’s almost no way to tell if a birth defect or small change in a baby is due to an ultrasound. Doctors say they’re safe, but are cautious to recommend that they’re used sparingly. I’ve been thinking about the mystery of Suri, and remembered how Tom bought an ultrasound machine and was talking about how much he loved checking out his unborn child. People really criticized him for it at the time:
An ultrasound machine works by sending vibrations into the body and then waiting for them to bounce back. The machine can use information from the echoes to produce a moving image of a fetus. But not all of the energy that goes into the body comes back outâ€â€some gets absorbed in the tissues. This can cause cells to heat up, or it can make trapped gas bubble up.
Studies of ultrasound in lab animals have shown that heat and bubble formation (or “cavitation”) can damage internal organs.
Few studies of ultrasound have been conducted on the human fetus (for ethical and logistical reasons), and there’s no smoking gun to suggest that the machines are causing harm. We’ve known for a long time that ultrasound heats up human tissueâ€â€that’s the rationale for its application in physical therapy. Several experiments conducted overseas have shown an increase in left-handedness (or at least a reduction in right-handedness) among those exposed to prenatal ultrasound, which suggests that the test could have neurological effects…
Is Tom Cruise putting his babyâ€â€or his fianceeâ€â€at risk? It depends on what kind of machine he’s using, and whether he’s got a trained sonographer to help him out. He may have a machine that doesn’t have the more dangerous high-power settings.
The article goes on to say that cumulative sonograms aren’t necessarily more damaging than individual sonograms.
There are studies showing ultrasounds are relatively safe, and that there is no connection between prenatal ultrasounds and birth defects. These studies are using old technology, though, and Tom undoubtedly had a 3D ultrasound for Katie’s pregnancy:
In addition, [Kjell Salvesen of the University of Trondheim, Norway] notes that the ultrasound machines used in his study [published in
The Lancet, showing ultrasounds are not damaging] are now becoming obsolete, with many hospitals relying on higher-energy devices that produce sharper images.
“The technology is rapidly developing, and these safety studies will always come 10 years after the devices have been taken into general use,” he says.
No one can say with certainty that the higher-energy ultrasonic devices cannot harm a fetus, says Vorhees. Heat isn’t the only way in which ultrasound might theoretically damage tissues, he adds. Sound waves may cause microscopic bubbles in body fluids to oscillate and sometimes collapse, Vorhees says. Scientists don’t know whether such problems can injure the fetus.
The scientific uncertainty over ultrasound led the Food and Drug Administration to advise against sonograms during pregnancy unless there is a problem such as bleeding, a family history of birth defects, or some other medical reason for the procedure, including advanced maternal age. FDA specifically warns against using ultrasound “frivolously” — simply to watch the baby float in the womb or to learn the baby’s sex.
Now that Suri hasn’t emerged, and her “birth certificate” is highly suspect, one wonders just exactly what is going on. She may not exist, she may be under Scientology house arrest, or she may have a disorder or delay of unknown origin. You know that Cruise got one of those 3D machines because he’s rich as anything and wouldn’t just buy a regular old model. I really suspect that my son’s teeth were damaged by one and wonder if little Suri suffered any ill effects from Tom’s crazy curiosity.
Katie Holmes is quoted in the upcoming Us Weekly saying that “Suri’s doing great!” but some quote from Katie or her publicist isn’t reassuring at this point.
The Toronto Fashion Monitor says that little Suri could be being raised under strict Scientolgy “no noise” conditions, in which little children are shielded from noise coupled with bad experiences because it can create a bad memory they call an “engram.”
Scientologists don’t believe in comforting hurt little children, either. They think that if they stumble and hit their head on a rock, for instance, they should be made to lay their head back on the rock so that the bad energy and pain will flow back into it.
Even if “Suri” or a baby facsimile emerges at this point, I’m never going to believe that she’s the product of Katie and Tom. Something highly suspect is going on, although I hope I’m not right that the baby does exist and is suffering from a defect or illness.
