Many of us in the real world are too busy taking care of patients to give a flying rat’s arse about publishing. I have no desire to submit anything for publication because it is a laborious process that detracts from the valuable time I can spend with my patients and more importantly, my family. If you think that the record for the youngest surviving fetus is at 21 - 22 weeks you are mistaken. Ask any neonatologist about their personal experience and they will confirm to you that they have successfully saved a few 20 weekers in their career and some grow up to have normal lives. 20 wks. is actually the cut off that many centers use to decide whether or not to resuscitate. I have personally seen an 18w+ premie survive, but not without significant developmental problems necessitating numerous surgeries. Just because you don’t read about it nor see it on TV doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen. Not everyone care to publish, nor does every parent of a premie want public notoriety.
Publication of a case study does not entail disclosing the identities of the parents or babies. Publication of information that is likely to guide the medical profession around the world towards practices which will save more patients’ lives, is as much an ethical obligation as working directly to save the patients in front of you. Writing up a case study for publication is hardly a big laborious process. As someone who has been the subject of a published case study, I know what it entails and it’s a snap compared to publication of papers describing multipatient clinical trials or retrospective analyses. The only hitch is that you can’t just make totally unsubstantiated claims the way you can when posting on an internet forum.
I had a 25 weeker 23 years ago and he survived, back when that early had survived only a few times. People I have run into have claimed that someone they knew, or an older relative, had lived in a shoebox, warmed near the stove, born at 6 mos (because they were 3 months early, but that made them 7 mos)
To this day, son does not so much as wear glasses, but I don’t know about your claim. It seems that making medical history would have encouraged you to publish this.