This is wrong more then right.

i dont know enoughf medical scince to make a good desisoin on weather that hospitals are not a good place to give burth for manny resoins. however i think to mutch of what this person seas is asumptoin. although i can see eliments of truth to some stuff.

Dangerous hippie bullshit.

How is it exactly that everytime we find ourselves faced with a problem our intial instinct is to destroy rather then fix.

The system is broken, the medical profession stresses results now because of goverment attempts to introduce market elements to provide efficency in something that is not all suited to it. Medicine deals with health care, not profit margins or efficiency.

However taking the stance that the entire system should just be deconstructed instead of reformed is just foolishness.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag.(show it anyway)

Sometimes Farhad, the principles and ideas that a practice are based on are just wrong and shouldn't be "fixed".

A good example would be formula instead of milk for babies. For years, this was considered the superior "scientific" solution to infant nutrition. The ideas in support of formula feeding have been found to be plain wrong, and so now formula is recommended only in special cases.

Similarly, medicalised hospital birth - another "scientific solution" - is detrimental in general to the health of the mother and the baby. This isn't to say that hospitals are not required for problems when they arise - but in general the benefits of having all. babies in a medicalized way outweigh the negative aspects.

Giving birth is not an illness - and yet we treat it that way - with obstitricians using fear and parental concern to cow parents into invasive medical procedures. Caesareans - so they can make tee time, often.

WHO recommends a caesarian rate of no more than 10-15%, yet actual rates around the world, especially in developed countries, range from 25-50%. This means there is a lot of unnecessary and dangerous intervention going on in hospitals and studies are showing that higher caesarian rates do not correlate with reduced infant mortality.

If hospitals were willing to introduce a midwife-based model of care, where the woman received exclusive and continued care from the one midwife throughout her entire pregnancy and post-natal period and also provide this care in the setting of the woman's choice, be it birthing centre, hospital or home, then as healthcare providers, they would be offering best practice care.

The fact is that birth is managed with a production-line mentality and few hospitals are capable of offering the best-practice level of care.

I've had a medicalised hospital birth and a natural homebirth. The hospital experience was dehumanising and made even more terrifying than it should have been, because the staff lied to us about our baby's condition.

The homebirth was by far the most rewarding and empowering experience of my life and I was cared for in the most professional, caring and respectful way possible.

Natural birth is not possible for a small percentage of women whose health status put them at risk, however, it is possible for a very large percentage of women, but is not made available to them in current hospital practices.

Dag that is a subjective statement that birth is looked upon as a illness, there is a clear need to have a doctors presence during births, complications do arise and can happen especially if the delivery is pre-mature.

Most hospitals have maternity wards for this reason, a separation between the ICU and other departments with the maternity ward usually sitting in another adjacent building with it's own exits and entrances.

What we are talking about in general is the fact that health care in North America is run like a business rather than a social equalizer, the treatment you get in Mount Sinai Hospital NY would be totally different to other municipal hospitals. All of them are dealing with tighter budgets but larger oversight looking to fix efficiency and optimize patient care not to mention avoid litigations. This is what leads to decreased care by the doctors for the patients because they have performance targets to meet, a social good has turned into a marketable and manageable commodity. There is more to this issue to, from lax control by FDA with regards to drugs, drug companies pushing for more medication use.

But in no way is it due to the rubbish the person talk about in the video.

It probably would help to give birth in a relaxed comfortable 4 the woman inviroment. so the comprimise is makign sure as much as posable that the babby is ok before birth then just having the birth at home with sumone there to help the birthing. but then u wud probabl need more staff and it would cost more. in the end the system is just going to be a compramize. the fact is in england and usa we should pay more tax and from that have excilant services. we shud just have a computer that controles everything

Natural birth makes economic sense. A normal vaginal delivery costs a couple of thousand dollars. A caesarian costs well over ten-fifteen thousand.

In most U.S. states and in Australia, homebirth costs the health system nothing, it's a user-pays system. Fees for homebirth in both countries are about two thousand dollars and women who choose this kind of birth are more than happy to pay the amount-it's a small price to pay for the best midwifery care you could possibly receive.

*save

Saving this video from queue deletion, sending it to the top of the queue for one more try. Originally submitted on Wednesday 11th April 2007 (save called by gold star member deathcow)

Ultimately it's the womans choice.
People need to recognise the diversity of birth experiences.

> there is a clear need to have a doctors presence during births

Well, except the statistics show that you or the baby are more likely to be harmed...

what a load of absolute twaddle. call me when the infant mortality rate of a nation like Angola where there are only "natural" (read: medically unassisted) births isn't THIRTY times the rate in a developed nation like the US. I DARE you to try to peddle this nonsense to a mother in sub-sahara Africa dying of hypovolemic shock from complications during pregnancy (where, I might remind you, that the death rate of mothers who are practically all giving natural childbirth is horrifically high at something like 4% while it is a mere ~1/4000 births in the US). I'm sorry, but birdshit and cyanide are natural and there's certainly nothing noble or wholesome about those things, I'm afraid this entire simpleminded argument disappears with the slightest puff of reason. and here it is.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag.(show it anyway)

The idea you are promoting gluonium, is wrong. From the Infant mortality Wikipedia article that graph comes from:

Infant mortality is the death of infants in the first year of life. The leading causes of infant mortality are dehydration and disease.

Nothing about natural birth in there that I see.

oh come on. fine, here is neonatal mortality rates only. note that the correlation with previous data is near perfect and that "Generally, half of all infant deaths occur when the baby is born at home with no medical care". Still not satisfied? ok then how bout skimming this especially grim estimate of perinatal (during childbirth) mortality rates? I again direct your attention to the graph on page two which demonstrates a SIXFOLD increased risk of stilbirth in developing nations over that of the developed world where the main cause of deaths in developing nations is again attributed to lack of professional medical care during the birth process. I'm sorry but I find the ignorant sillyness for which people so readily gamble with the lives of their own children (and themselves!) to be absolutely ghastly.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag.(show it anyway)

From your linked article gluonium:
The main causes of neonatal mortality in developing countries are infectious diseases (36% of cases): pneumonia, tetanus and diarrhoea. Premature births (27%) and asphyxia (23%) are also major causes of infant mortality. In 60 to 80% of deaths, the child’s weight is very low, a condition related to the mother’s state of health.

So again, I would say that the causes are a reflection of poor health, nutrition and disease. I will battle your Google-fu with a bit of my own:

"For the Netherlands, as the only country with a sizable proportion of natural childbirths (home birth as proxy)…Dutch national perinatal statistics from 1986 …found that perinatal mortality rates were much higher for obstetricians in hospitals than for midwife-attended home care or midwife-attended hospital care, at all levels of risk when controlling for gestation, maternal age and parity" (p. 17---from studies by Treffers and Laan 1986 and Tew and Damstra-Wijmenga 1991).

Thanks Dag, for those stats.

It's not reasonable to compare African perinatal rates with those of developed nations, Gluonium. Birth outcomes are greatly affected by the health status of the mothers and in these different regions, women's health issues are worlds apart.

This video is aimed at consumers of developed nations, trying to alert them to the dangers of the many routine procedures used in hospitals.

I'll admit it's not the highest quality presentation, but it was all I could find on the topic and I'm happy to say that it's done its job in drawing people's attention to this issue.

Persephone, you said, "Natural birth is not possible for a small percentage of women whose health status put them at risk, however, it is possible for a very large percentage of women, but is not made available to them in current hospital practices."

This statement, I feel, is untrue. If you are going to argue for systemic pressure in the environment of a hospital for unhealthy medical interference that benefits the hospital but not the mother or child, then I will agree and make a case, as I think Farhad would, for an overhaul of the medical system. However, saying that natural birth is not made available to women in current hospital practices isn't true - all women, save for those unconscious and without a proxy, have the ability and the right to demand a natural birth in a hospital, and by that I mean a birth without anesthetics or surgery. It seems like the issues of natural birth and homebirth/midwife-assisted birth are being mixed up, and they are two distinct issues.

I do believe the cause of many birthing procedure problems is economic pressure on hospitals to rush births along as quickly as possible, rather than to ensure the health of the mother and child - greater, not lesser, oversight by the FDA would be a start, homebirth or not.

Anyways, all of this discussion is nice, but I'm vehemently downvoting this sift due to the fact that the video is just crap. The amygdala shutting down, causing contractions to voluntarily cease? Umm.....right, except for the part that the amygdala increases activity, and that it has no ability to stop contractions, due to the positive, not negative, feedback cycle that is created. And hospitals scaring women? The increase in contraction strength is linked to an increase in amygdala activity, which often results in women becoming afraid or nervous - this is an ingrained physiological response, not caused by a particular setting. And stopping the drug companies, which he already claims is a juggernaut beyond control, from lobbying the government? Right.

All respects, Persephone and Dag, for your particular choices and your beliefs on the matter. The discussion has been nice, but honestly, this video doesn't deserve to be published.

Rembar... with all due respect, having been "around" hundreds of births and knowing the histories and outcomes behind a great many of them, I can assure you that this guy in this video is right on the money.

Parents should not need to demand a natural birth. Healthy people should default to natural childbirth.

At our home birth, the midwife was qualified to deal with minor problems (a torn bit of skin hooked by an exiting toe that she stitched up in our case) and the hospital was standing by in case any serious problems arose.

this is not the video I would choose to head this cause, but upvote for the heated discussion.

Deathcow, I'm not sure how closely you read into my previous comment, but I'm not talking about his conclusions. I agree to a large extent with his larger social and economic reasoning for why hospitals push women towards surgical procedures and chemically-induced contractions to speed up births. But that's no excuse for scientifically inaccurate claims. He's wrong. There's no two ways about it. Unless of course, in the middle of all those births, you witnessed some poor woman's amygdala shutting down and stopping her contractions in the middle of labor because a hospital setting scared her.

Rembar, go back to the video and listen at about 3:22. He says "the amygdala says this is not a safe place for birth... and the process of labour shuts down voluntarily until a safe haven can be found to birth"

He doesn't say the amygdala shuts down, but the process of labour does. He is absolutely correct in saying this, because when a woman experiences fear in labour, adrenalin neutralises oxytocin, which causes contractions to come to a screeching halt.

Later he says "the amygdala shuts down the system", meaning the system of birth and the interplay of hormones that I just described.

I have also been involved in many births, as a doula, and a brief stint as a trainee midwife and as a mother. I can tell you from my experience in all of these situations, that when a woman is afraid, her labour is sabotaged.

I can also tell you from my experience of birthing in a hospital, that hospitals can make a woman terrified. Routine procedures like putting an IV insert into her wrist upon arrival "just in case you need to have a caesarian" do nothing to send a positive message that she is going to be able to deliver with ease.

Telling a woman that her baby is in fetal distress because "It's not moving enough (prior to the onset of established labour), and telling her that "If you don't get it out today, chances are it will have an apgar score of 4 or less and its survival will be compromised" is using absolutely disgraceful fear tactics and is the kind of lies women are told, to get them to agree to hospital procedures like inducing labour at 10 days past the due date.

My amygdala serves me well in remembering these words, because the birth of my little girl was one of the most devastating days of my life. Not because she was in distress (she had apgars of 9 and 10), not because she was born with compromised well-being, she was perfectly healthy, but because birthing her was like going into battle.

We had to fight for the right to birth her naturally throughout the entire labour. Eight hours into established and difficult labour (because let me tell you, synthetic prostaglandin is no party. My cervix tore from the force of its unnaturally rapid dilation) the good doctor wanted to speed things up with an IV of more oxytocin!

I'm happy to say that Dag was an amazing advocate for me, and we staved off the lions and did the rest of the labour naturally.

So, if you have any more questions about why hospitals are not a safe place to birth for the happy and healthy, just forward them to me, I'd be happy to tell you details of not-so-lucky women whose stories make mine look like a picnic.

You're right, redthing, women should be able to choose how they want to birth. Your linked article is in promotion of elective caesarian and states that 1 in 4 women make this choice for good reasons.

Women at high risk make this choice wisely, however I would argue that if a woman chooses this option to avoid the trauma of a natural birth, then she is not making an informed choice, because there is significant and prolonged pain after a caesarian and the risks of damage occurring to the woman or the baby are not negligible.

Have you ever seen one performed?

Providing they get the epidural right and don't have to repeat the procedure too often (it's not fun when they bungle attempts) and that the anesthetic is working properly, the woman won't feel the incision, but she will feel them wrestling the baby out, because it's not an easy chore to extract several pounds of newborn and placenta from a ten inch incision (they are getting so good at the bikini cut, but it's just SO tight)

Hopefully the anesthetic is still going strong while they sew up the uterus and shove it all back in. The woman may not be too out of it by then to see the baby held before her face, before they race it off for intubation, weighing, washing etc, but if she was as stressed out as women I have seen, they could knock her out for a while until it's all over.

Of course the pain doesn't end there. Any time the pain-killers wear off over the next few weeks, she'll get a little reminder that she's just had major surgery. She may not be able to walk erect for a while (days to weeks) because the stitches hurt and pull. And then there's her tender lap that is pretty painful to get a baby resting comfortably on while she struggles to breastfeed.

Finally, there's emotional pain to deal with. Like any labour there're the joys and sorrows of the experience. I believe birth shold be an empowering experience, a woman's rite of passage. I would argue that she cannot be empowered when her experience renders her a vessel from which a baby is removed, especially when the choice for caesarian was made simply to avoid pain.

You might think I'm painting a worst-case scenario here, but I haven't mentioned the serious damage the woman and baby could endure. I'll leave it up to any woman reading this to educate herself about those statistics, if she feels she needs to be informed, of course.

I don't understand what exactly we are arguing on here? At the end of the day it's solely up to the patient to make a decision about how the doctors will treat them. Saying that doctors act as bogey man scaring patients into carrying out Cesarean sections is just ridiculous, undertaking unnecessary surgery is not something doctors love to do, especially in a litigious society like the US. One botched surgery and his career can be finished. I don't see how someone can be forced to make a decision about their wealth fare when every statue in medicine protects the patient over the doctor.

As far as am concerned this a NON-issue which comes down to conjecture about how the mother feels and the how the child feels. My parents are both doctors and I was delivered in a medical hospital naturally, the same is with everyone I know. Yet I can't seem to see how such an event has affected me or other people's development negatively.

Persephone, I don't have a lot of time to write, so apologies for being brief.

You're right about the video, I went back and listened to that part. I do believe he says that the amygdala shuts down at some point, but he didn't there.

However, even that quote is not quite right. Labor cannot be shut down so simply, especially because of the volume of adrenaline required to provide to create a reaction to the effects of oxytocin is sky-high, as in, must be artificially manufactured and injected, even for the stress of childbirth. On top of that, the evolutionary mechanism for such an interaction between fear and contractions, if it were actually true, is shoddy at best and more likely plain wrong. The oxytocin/adrenaline interaction mechanism is a complex one, and one that is not chemically antagonistic, especially since high levels of adrenaline are expected and in fact natural during and after birth, as well as during sex, and orgasms. If adrenaline and oxytocin couldn't work together, sex wouldn't be as fun as it is. In short, adrenaline does not neutralize oxytocin, nor do contractions just stop when adrenaline is released.

Since that particular argument is factual in nature, it's only fair if I quote you some sources. If you'll take a look at the three papers I have below, you'll notice that in no way do high-stress levels of adrenaline serve to interfere with contractions in a negative, non-regulatory manner, and that in fact, it has a beneficial effect at a natural (read: non-Epipen injection) level.

Contraction of the depolarized uterine muscle. Department of Normal Physiology, Sverdlovsk Medical Institute (Presented by Academician L. S. Persianinov, Academy of Medical Sciences of the USSR). Translated from Byulleten'' Éksperimental''noi Biologii i Meditsiny, Vol. 68, No. 7, pp. 8–11, July, 1969.

Obstetric Outcome Following Epidural Analgesia with Bupivacaine-Adrenaline 0.25% or Bupivacaine 0.125% with Sufentanil-A Prospective Randomized Controlled Study in 1000 Parturients.
Obstetrical & Gynecological Survey. 53(9):533-534, September 1998.
Olofsson, Ch.; Ekblom, A.; Ekman-Ordeberg, G.; Irestedt, L.

or, perhaps most ironically: Why Natural Childbirth? Judith A. Lothian. J Perinat Educ. 2000 Fall; 9(4): 44–46.

Anyways, I agree hospitals do bad things, and there should be more oversight and regulation to prevent this. I have no problem with that, I have a problem with bad science.

You can email me or go to the Coffeehouse if you want, but it's probably not the best idea to continue this discussion on profile comments, perhaps a better setting would be in order. Cheers.

I have nothing against natural birth - as I said in my original comment it's ultimately the womans choice. I do however dislike biased videos that make women feel guilty for not going the route of natural birth and portray alternatives as wrong and harmful for the mother and the baby.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag.(show it anyway)

This is a humdinger, and it's not even out of the queue.

just need one more vote..

You damn hippies can't be trusted to know anything.
Only people who spent $100,000 on a medical degree can be trusted to make critical and controversial decisions.

Redthing, I appreciate what you're saying about videos which make a woman feel guilty. I've been in that situation myself, from things people have said, but I'm learning to resist the temptation to beat myslef up about choices I've made, knowing that I made the best choice for me at the time.

I do believe that external things cannot really make us feel guilty, unless we let them.