Monday morning thoughts

It was in the New York Times yesterday, the U.S lowered its infant mortality rate but remains 29th in ranking with other industrialized nations

It made me start thinking once again—a daily preponderance—as to how and why when we have so much, we seem so unable to make progress in this area.

I've thought about this state of affairs many, many times. At first I blamed it on American women and our soft society—no one really wants to suffer or have to work at something—we all want it to come easy—to have the big car and the big house and the perfect family and the money to live comfortably. We want everything to be perfect around us and for us but don’t understand how our own actions contribute to that. When things don't go as hoped we are quick to blame others.

But in working with pregnant women and helping them to deliver their babies everyday I’ve come to see that the medical establishment is as much if not more to blame. We are in the business of fixing things and when you try to fix birth—the most obvious thing to fix is the pain. A few years back the nurses in the hospital where I work began to use a pain scale of 1-10. Now every Labor and Delivery nurse knows that a woman having her 1st baby probably has no idea what the pain of labor is going to be like so when she comes in, with the menstrual cramping that is early labor and defines it as a 10, the nurse will say, "No, No, what you are having now is about a 2 or maybe a 3, a 10 is as if a car ran over your foot". Now very few women have had that experience either but it is something they can quantify and so lower their rating of their present pain. The problem is that every 2 hours the nurse will once again ask the women to rate her pain along with taking her other vitals. Now that we believe we have successfully adjusted her understanding of her pain we take her rating as gospel.

This constant concern and emphasis on the pain, skews the woman’s and the nurse’s concern about what is important. We are not asking her how to help her get the baby delivered; we are focusing only on the pain and how much she feels she has. In all this pain, the true focus, the baby, gets lost. All we want to do is get rid of or mask the pain and for most women I see this is how they approach labor. Not, how can I work with my body forces, what can I do to assist this process but how will the pain be alleviated. The standard medical answer now is with drugs—either through the IV or in the epidural. The other standard answer, “It is perfectly safe.” Is just a little too pat. In many and most ways we do not know this to be true. Yes, we can in someway say that we do not know of direct effects on the baby although even this is sketchy at best but we certainly DO KNOW that in most cases it will upset the process and IN TRYING TO get the birth process back on track Medicine will next recommend the use of many other drugs and procedures. The combination of these things escalates things in varied and unpredictable ways. But wait we have a solution for that as well CESAREAN SECTION. (any wonder it is now over 35% in most hospitals)

And so I feel it is the medical people who have sold a false bill of goods to today’s women and most women do not want to know about it. They want the baby but without any pain, suffering or time involved. Too many want to be induced before the baby says it is ready (what else is induction), c-section on demand, any and all drugs available but in a beautiful room with all the conveniences that money and modern medicine can offer. That in our country is what state of the art medical care is all about. And so we give this to them—as complicit as they are in loosing the focus on what is most important, giving a healthy baby the best start possible in life.
Is there any way to get back on track??