Last week's Day to Day on Co-Sleeping

Last Thursday, NPR's Day to Day grabbed onto the Washington Post's coattails and had their own article on co-sleeping. Day to Day called up their local medical expert, Dr. Spesiel to offer his reservations on co-sleeping. Dr. Spesiel offered up that co-sleeping made him nervous and he alluded vaguely to some study where some babies died as a result of sleeping with their parents (but he didn't offer the details - if the parents were obese or drunk or drugggd etc).
As a new parent, I find these articles on co-sleeping where so-called experts are brought in to discourage new parents from sleeping with their babies so irritating. First of all, I find it fascinating that the people who are made nervous by co-sleeping are generally men. I don't think co-sleeping needs to become a gender issue, but I do think families need to do what works for them, and especially breastfeeding mothers who are the ones likely to be up with their babies throughout the night, so maybe we could leave it up to the people who are breastfeeding - since it is their sleep at risk. I mean really, until men lactate, maybe they could clamp it and defer to the ones who do lactate (my husband certainly does - but thanks to our co-sleeping, my husband is also sleeping through the night - and it turns out there's nothing he loves more than to snuggle with our sleeping baby).
I also hesitate to place a whole lot of value on the opinions of medical experts. If we just take a minute and review the history of the opinions of medical experts, we'll find more instances of where they were wrong than right - and not that there aren't things we should be grateful for - but can we just keep in mind that 50 years ago, these same medical experts discouraged breastfeeding because they thought (for some reason) that breastmilk was nutritionally insufficent. They also discouraged picking up your baby lest you spoil your baby. They encouraged feeding your baby on a schedule of every four hours then wondered why suddenly all the babies are colickly (when really they were just hungry). Medical experts, in the past, have thought some pretty weird things so do we really want to view them as the unquestionable authority on all things?
Lastly, humans are pack animals. Every night, I nurse my baby down on my side of the bed, then I get up and do a few things. When I come back to bed, my baby has scooched himself across the bed so that he is snuggling up against my husband. So how do cribs make sense? (never mind that just as many babies die each year alone in their cribs). As my friend Kristina says, just because something is common doesn't mean it's normal.
Anyway, at first I thought about our co-sleeping and thought, it works for us and really, it's nobody else's business. Then I found myself commenting on the Day to Day website and thinking "Oh hang it. I just became an advocate." So there you go. I outed myself. I'm all for co-sleeping - mostly because it entails sleeping. We're the most well rested family I know. So are all the people we know who do co-sleep. Why mess with what works?