Medicine: Disinformation

Column by René Laurentin published in Le Figaro on Tuesday 24 April 1990 (page 2), under the title “Médecine : la désinformation” (“Medicine: Disinformation”), with the subheads “Truths concealed • RU 486 • The contraceptive pill • The electronic ear”. Only the last section, devoted to Alfred Tomatis, is transcribed here; the passages on RU 486 and the contraceptive pill appear in the facsimile.

Le Figaro — Tuesday 24 April 1990, page 2

Truths concealed — RU 486, the contraceptive pill, the electronic ear

If the media sometimes dramatise certain insignificant risks, as Haroun Tazieff denounced in Le Figaro of 10 January, more often serious risks are covered up in order to protect financial or other interests.

[…]

The Electronic Ear

Another case of spectacular concealment: Dr Alfred Tomatis has made countless discoveries about the ear. He invented medical ultrasound imaging. It used to be claimed that the child was born deaf and blind, since myelination of the auditory nerve was not yet complete. He supplied proof that the child in gestation already hears its mother’s voice around the sixth month, and he drew remarkable therapeutic consequences from it.

By listening to music through the Electronic Ear (which filters the sounds), he improved the technique of painless childbirth to an unprecedented degree. At the hospital in Vesoul, Dr Klopfenstein has been experimenting with these methods since 1987. The results were surprising. In February 1988 he compared three groups of fifty pregnant women:

Some arrived with no preparation.
Others practised the Russian method of painless childbirth, combining breathing and muscle techniques.
Others had done thirty music listening sessions.

The results were spectacular. Anxiety had fallen considerably in all these women, as measured on the Hamilton scale: from 23 to 6 (four times lower) in the best cases. Deliveries were also quicker: 4 hours for the group with no preparation; 3 h 30 for the Russian method; only 2 h 30 for the Electronic Ear. In this group, four times fewer caesareans, fewer episiotomies, and so on. These first tests of February 1988 were confirmed by the following ones.

[A passage of the transcription is illegible on the scan at this point.]

In the specialised premature unit in Munich, where Professor Rigen uses the Electronic Ear with children, listening by three premature babies of six months, each weighing less than a kilo, effectively stimulated heartbeat and other signs of vitality. They were more alert, more toned. One of them even tried to sit up.

Following Dr Tomatis’s little-known work closely, I had written an article at the end of 1988 to make these results known. I offered it in turn to three magazines. At the first of them, the medical attaché vetoed it “so as not to have trouble with the doctors”. For Dr Tomatis (out of jealousy?) has been repressed. In France he has been forbidden to practise medicine and he pursues his work only as a psychologist, hence without Social Security cover. His centres operate more easily in many foreign countries.

A fine example of concealment for a man whose discoveries are of Nobel Prize dimensions.

R. L.

Source: René Laurentin, “Médecine : la désinformation”, Le Figaro, 24 April 1990, p. 2. © Le Figaro, all rights reserved. Transcription made from a scan of the page whose OCR is degraded; proper names (notably “Rigen”) should be checked against the facsimile.

Today: what science says

This 1990 column makes four claims about Alfred Tomatis and the Electronic Ear: that he invented medical ultrasound imaging, that the foetus hears its mother’s voice around the sixth month, that filtered music listening shortens labour and reduces anxiety, and that premature babies benefit from it. Research sorts them very unevenly.

REFUTED — medical ultrasound. The invention of obstetric ultrasound is historically documented: it belongs to Ian Donald’s Glasgow team, with obstetrician John MacVicar and engineer Tom Brown, whose first publication appeared in The Lancet in 1958 (Donald, MacVicar & Brown, 1958). The attribution to Tomatis rests on no source in the history of medicine; it is the author’s assertion.

CONFIRMED, and even earlier than stated — foetal hearing. That the unborn child perceives sounds, and that the mother’s voice plays a role in its development, is established by research. Measured by ultrasound, the first foetal response to a 500 Hz sound is seen as early as 19 weeks of gestation (about four and a half months), and sensitivity to low frequencies then sharpens (Hepper & Shahidullah, 1994). The article’s “sixth month” is therefore rather a late threshold. This is one of Tomatis’s soundest intuitions, even though other researchers established it by their own methods.

NOT VERIFIABLE — the Vesoul study. The figures (anxiety divided by four, labour cut from 4 h to 2 h 30, four times fewer caesareans) are reported by the journalist on the word of a hospital doctor, for three groups of fifty women. The article gives no reference to a peer-reviewed publication, does not say whether the groups were formed by random allocation, nor whether the assessors knew which group each patient belonged to. We could not identify it in the indexed literature. Effects this large, without a rigorous control group and without replication, call for the greatest caution: in clinical research, early small series frequently overestimate the true effect.

QUALIFIED — premature babies. Music and singing directed at premature newborns have been the subject of controlled trials. A meta-analysis of randomised trials concludes there are short-term benefits (stabilisation of some physiological signs, support for parent-infant bonding), but no evidence of a lasting effect on development (Bieleninik, Ghetti & Gold, 2016, Pediatrics). These interventions, however, are music or singing, not sound filtered by an Electronic Ear: the specific effect of filtering is not demonstrated by this work.

The level of evidence for the method itself remains weak. The most rigorous trials of Tomatis-type auditory stimulation are disappointing: the Cochrane review of sound therapies in autism finds no evidence of efficacy (Sinha et al., 2011). On preparation for childbirth, we found no randomised trial confirming the effect described in 1990.

What remains is the substance of the piece: what the article calls “concealment” is, from a historian’s point of view, the fate of a method whose observations were never submitted to the controlled trials that could have established or refuted them. Listening, in the active sense Tomatis gave the word, and hearing from before birth are realities of physiology; the clinical benefits of the device remain to be demonstrated.