Was Ear Disorders Link to Pregnancy a Nazi Plot?
FRIDAY, May 20 (HealthDay News) — For the last 66 years, doctors have been taught that pregnancy can worsen a hearing-loss disease in women. It now turns out that might not be true — and who’s to blame? Apparently, the Nazi government of wartime Germany. Dr. William Lippy, an Ohio otologist and expert on otosclerotic surgery, reported this week on the results of a study that starkly refutes the long-accepted notion among physicians that pregnant women with otosclerosis — a degenerative disease of the ear bone — are at heightened risk of hearing loss and even deafness. “We were able to prove that there was absolutely no significant correlation between pregnancy and hearing loss among women with otosclerosis,” Lippy said. “Women with the disease who had children, regardless of how many, had no worse hearing than women who’d never had children.” In fact, Lippy traced the source for this misinformation to a 1939 seminar held by German physicians. At the time, their speculation of an ot
