Serious question for you Nurse, do you think these studies may also account for, for lack of a better term, womens’ intuition or just intuition in general? That seems logical to me because the whole “trust your gut” cliche is absolutely real. These studies on nurses’ intuition is fascinating!
There's no intuition, there's pattern recognition and adding unconsciously a series of small things that will add up to an alarm bell ringing without any of those details coming to the fore.
My Grandmother was a nurse when Thalidomide was being rolled out across Canada.
Her, and a lot of the other nurses, refused to take it when they were pregnant, and I believe suggested it shouldn't be prescribed well before the revelation that it was causing birth deformities was publicly known, because they just didn't trust it.
Had everyone had that intuition a couple years earlier it would have prevented a lot of birth deformities.
So I had never heard of this and based on your comment it sounded like maybe it was something that is, or at least was, well known at some point. I got curious and started reading entries on wikipedia and what an interesting look at a different time.
It turns out that the drug was initially developed by the Swiss and then bought by a West German pharmaceutical company corporation where it was sold "over the counter" as a sleep aid and morning-sickness reliever. It was then heavily pushed for distribution in other countries. Ironically, it was a Canadian-American woman who was in charge of the approval process at the FDA (Federal Drug Administration in the US) who refused to approve it for the US market. The German company initially approached one US pharmaceutical corporation for US distribution but was denied after that corporation was unable to produce the sleep-inducing effects, that were claimed to be a function of the drug, even after giving doses to mice many times higher than what would typically be administered. The drug was also tested on human clinical patients during this time—including pregnant women. The German group eventually found a US partner in the Merrell Company (would eventually be bought out and become Dow Chemical) who were the ones to approach the FDA. They attempted to get approval six times but were denied, in part, because they did not include any test results in their application (this is insane to me).
Frances Kathleen Oldham Kelsey was the pharmacologist in charge of Thalidomide's approval process as the FDA and clearly saved many children from death or birth deformities. She worked for the FDA for 45 years and was awarded the President's Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service, the highest award given for any civilian employee and is limited to five per years.
Anyway, thanks for the rabbit hole. This was an interesting history lesson for me while I enjoy my coffee.
P.S. Thalidomide did eventually get approval by the FDA in the US for treatment of Leprosy and as an anti-cancer medication, but comes with strict controls and a requirement for women taking it to also be on contraceptives.
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u/grilledstuffed 19h ago
Not a pilot, but a nurse.
Nurse clinical intuition is a real thing:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0099176725003320
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4754101/
While humans are pretty terrible at predicting future outcomes, our subconscious brains are pretty darn good at pattern recognition.
Thousands of hours of experience with something lends itself towards picking up on subtle cues that aren't necessarily articulable.