Matthew Orde

Forensic pathologist. UCalg, USask, Canadian Forensic Medical Consulting
"To the living we owe respect; to the dead we owe only the truth." - Voltaire

[Matthew Orde @CanadianForMed]

The autopsy: a time-proven, reliable, and relatively inexpensive process to inform and assist the living, and one which provides an important societal safeguard. #ForensicPathology #DeathInvestigationMatters

[Priya Banerjee, MD @Autopsy_MD]

https://t.co/TJ0HX0kHRJ

This is what happens when #deathinvestigation isn’t uniform across the country. Think about irreversible loss of she was cremated #autopsy #forensics #pathology #Vallow #LoriVallow #homicide

[NAME @theNAME1966]

Free Webinar for Students & Trainees: Manner of Death Determination in Challenging Cases by Lorenzo Gitto, MD, Ilaria Tarozzi, MD, and Deland Weyrauch, MD

🗓 Thursday, June 18, 2026 | 4:00 PM ET

🔗 Register ➡️ https://t.co/205Z00x75K

[Matthew Orde @CanadianForMed]

Sure to leave a sour taste in the mouth.
https://t.co/Bpbt81BqIH

[Richard Jones @forensicmed]

Rib fractures in infancy in the Family Court again: Blackburn Borough Council v BB & Ors (2026] EWFC 69 (1 April 2026).

Deals with the nature/cause/ age of rib fractures, including to the posterior ribcage & includes a critique of expert opinions given.

https://t.co/NiJCVP9dej

[Matthew Orde @CanadianForMed]

Me: what's that option at the second from right?
A: don't worry, we place them all into the same garbage anyway. 🤦‍♂️

[Matthew Orde @CanadianForMed]

Bed-sharing with young infants is associated with a heightened risk of sudden unexpected infant death, often by way of accidental smothering. Sadly I see this all too often. https://t.co/XynFwdjzfP

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

A kid drew himself sleeping in bed between mom and dad and labeled it 'safe.'

In Japan, this exact sleeping arrangement has a name. They call it 'the river.' Mother is one bank. Father is the other. The child between them is the water. Roughly 70% of Japanese mothers sleep this way with their kids, sometimes through the teenage years. The Western model of putting a kid alone in their own bedroom is barely 200 years old. For most of human history, in most cultures still alive today, kids slept beside their parents.

James McKenna runs the Mother-Baby Behavioral Sleep Lab at Notre Dame. He spent decades watching what happens when parents and kids share a bed. The bodies sync up. Heart rates align with the parent's, breathing falls into the same rhythm, and by morning even sleep stages have started matching. The parent's body, in McKenna's words, acts as a kind of biological jumper cable for the child's.

In 2013, researchers in the Netherlands tracked 193 babies through the first year of life. They measured cortisol, the brain's main stress hormone. Babies who had spent more weeks co-sleeping in the first six months produced less cortisol under stress at 12 months. Sleeping near a parent had rewired the kid's stress system to be calmer under pressure.

Inside the kid's brain at night, the amygdala, the fear alarm, gets more sensitive as the body gets tired. Darkness makes it worse. A 2021 paper in PLoS One from Australian researchers showed that light directly suppresses amygdala activity. Lights off, alarm louder. The whole brain is wired to read 'alone in a dark room' as a threat.

Now add a parent's body to that bed. The kid's nervous system reads warm body, breathing nearby, familiar smell. The threat alarm dials down. Two parents on either side dial it down twice. The drawing is the kid's brain calculating maximum safety: I am surrounded by the people who keep me alive, and nothing can reach me without going through them first.

The arrangement in this drawing is what most of human history called 'sleeping.' Sleeping the kid alone in another room is a 200-year-old Western invention that we forgot was an invention. Every kid who has ever padded into your room at 3am and crawled into the middle of the bed is just trying to redraw the picture.

[Elizabeth Montgomery, MD @LizMontgomeryMD]

A colleague in Cyprus is looking for a Pathologist! Contact him if you are interested. Reports can be in English

[Michael Inzlicht @minzlicht]

Imagine a 19-year-old scrolling TikTok. She watches a creator list five "signs you have undiagnosed anxiety." She recognizes three in herself. By the end of the week, she's describing herself as anxious to her friends. A month later, she's avoiding situations she used to handle fine.

What went wrong?

In a new paper by my PhD student Dasha Sandra, titled "Why mental health awareness can harm: Converging explanations for a societal problem", we argue that well-meaning mental health awareness can backfire, and we identify how. Four separate literatures (concept creep, nocebo effects, prevalence inflation, and illness self-labeling) have been circling the same problem from different angles. We show they converge on three mechanisms:

1.Awareness lowers the threshold for what counts as a disorder.
2. It trains people to scan their inner lives for symptoms and reinterpret normal distress as pathology.
3. Once someone adopts an illness identity, they behave in ways that confirm and deepen it.

The evidence is wide. Learning that loneliness is harmful makes solitude feel worse. Learning that stress is harmful worsens well-being and performance. Awareness videos about fake conditions like "wind turbine syndrome" produce real headaches. Trigger warnings raise anticipatory anxiety without reducing distress.

This does not mean awareness should stop. It means awareness can have unintended consequences, including manufacturing the suffering it tries to prevent. Inoculating people against these mechanisms works, and we already have evidence it does.

Link to paper: https://t.co/ucoGyhEuAj

[Matthew Orde @CanadianForMed]

I bet the elephants had been planning this for a while.
https://t.co/T31sYtuMsI

[Matthew Orde @CanadianForMed]

Brrr - chilly outside 🥶

[NAME @theNAME1966]

The answer to the April 17th Case of the Week is now posted at https://t.co/gnZugwyQV0

[Matthew Orde @CanadianForMed]

Correlation vs causation

[Matthew Scott @Barristerblog]

Bournemouth lobster lover admits criminal damage to lobster. I can see how it could be theft, but given nobody knows what happened to the lobster, how could it be criminal damage?
https://t.co/hozvitsqC3

[NAME @theNAME1966]

The answer to the April 3rd Case of the Week is now posted at https://t.co/A2gelhyGBr

[Matthew Orde @CanadianForMed]

@drphilhammond It is a cooordinated team approach that is required to mount a successful legal defence. A good lawyer is the lynchpin, but yes, reliable and effective expert input can also be crucial.

[The Vancouver Sun @VancouverSun]

Five people a day still dying from toxic drugs in B.C.: Coroner https://t.co/ZZJNvd1SoU

[Matthew Orde @CanadianForMed]

Cyanosis: blue discolouration of the skin and mucous membranes due to a reduction of the level of oxygen in the blood. Can be a marker of severe cardiorespiratory disease. Alternatively: https://t.co/jYH9dYJBrK

[Joseph Fasano @Joseph_Fasano_]

In the Netherlands, if a person dies alone, without any family or friends as mourners, a poet will be sent to write a poem and read it at the burial service. It's called the Lonely Funeral Project, and it's just humans being good humans.

[Shaun Lintern @ShaunLintern]

👀 Did you post this to my office? Written with pink/purple ink? I'd really like to talk to you if so, I can protect your identity but what you sent was really important but not enough on its own. Get in touch via DM email etc... Pls RT.

[Mark Teasdale ★ @MarksGonePublic]

Happening Now look about #NorthVan
Lower Lonsdale Neighbours
Rebecca Walder • 28m • G
• ••
Orcas spotted on Seabus
#NorthVan #Vancouver

[Mushtaq Bilal, PhD @MushtaqBilalPhD]

Major academic publishers' revenue and what they pay authors and reviewers:

Revenue:
Elsevier: $3.9 billion
Springer Nature: $2 billion
Wolters Kluwer: $1.6 billion
Wiley: $1.8 billion
Taylor & Francis: $800 million
Sage: $500 million

They pay:
Authors: $0
Reviewers: $0

[Matthew Orde @CanadianForMed]

The fact that this homicide (by way of shotgun injuries to the face, neck & chest) was missed upon initial assessment at the death scene underscores the need for a thorough postmortem examination when there is any doubt that a death is entirely innocent.
https://t.co/REHxVSe2GI