How do vaginally delivered, exclusively breastfed infants fare in comparison to their Cesearean delivered, formula-fed counterparts? Does it impact the delicate infant microbiome?
Today research wrongly considers hospital birth as the gold standard. Bias towards hospital births causes the majority of researchers to ignore the fact that women could achieve even better outcomes than hospital birth, at planned attended homebirth.
Caesarean sections, unless strictly indicated, may be harmful to the health of mothers and their newborn babies. Two questions remain. Why are rates still on the increase? What can be done to reverse current trends? As a head obstetrician recently said, "If highly-paid soccer goalies won't practice evidence-based diving for the ball when they are paid millions of dollars a year, what hope is there for obstetricians?"
When it comes to pregnancy, the bowing to the false god of safety has become the standard
Yet another study, this one consisting of every birth in The Netherlands over two years, demonstrates that home births are safer than hospital births. Women are more than twice as likely to end up in intensive care if they give birth in a hospital! Nonetheless, birth has been medicalized, resulting in enormous harm to both mothers and babies.
Unlike the popular belief that vaginal birth is the main way to populate a newborn´s body with maternal symbiotic bacteria, seeding actually begins with implantation and pregnancy and is further reinforced with vaginal birth and breastfeeding. A baby is not growing in a perfectly sterile environment until birth, but on the contrary is surrounded and supported by several different bacterial communities throughout pregnancy, which reside in different organs of the mother
Two million American women will take an epidural trip this year during childbirth. In most cases, they'll be ill–informed as to possible side effects or alternate methods of pain relief. In many ways, epidurals are the drug trip of the current generation. Similar to street drug pushers, most anesthesiologists in the delivery rooms maintain a low profile, avoid making eye contact and threaten to walk out if they don't get total cooperation
The birth of your child deserves special care and attention. Natural pregnancy and natural childbirth are precursors to a happy, health child.
Latest smear campaign against homebirth from Amer J ObGyn contributes to the wrongful and avoidable death of at least 100 mothers every year from unnecessary C-sections.
It's hard to compete with 20 billion years of evolutionary selection, but the current medical management of the birth of the fetus and the placenta attempts to do just that, albeit rather unsuccessfully. For eons, all animals including humans passed on genes and habits that ensured delivering a live healthy newborn without bleeding excessively or dying of postpartum hemorrhage at birth
45% of births in the US are now induced, but evidence supporting this intervention is severely lacking. Case controlled studies show no benefit to inducing for postdates. Routinely inducing for postdates is based on 3 uncontrolled, retrospective studies showing 1/1000 less stillbirths while ignoring possible increases in brain damage to newborns as a result of induction.
A new study linking birth induction to autism is rippling through the mainstream press, but something vitally important is being lost in the translation; namely, the need to return to natural, ancient birth practices, whenever possible.
"Mars Attack" is new term coined to describe unjustified violation of women by care providers at the time of birth, as well as the purposeful abandonment of the peer review system by major obstetric journals and the abandonment of the use of research evidence by ACOG in their latest protocols, in order to justify continued use of this form of violence against women.
In 2009, while 99.3% of US women delivered in hospital, 0.7% delivered at home. In response to this slight rise in homebirths, The American Journal of Obstetricians and Gynecologists issued a warning to all doctors and midwives to refuse to attend homebirth under all circumstances. In the absence of respected medical research showing planned homebirth to be unsafe, their recommendation is based on a single maternal death reported in the Daily Mail.
A new study in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Gynaecology confirms what many who have undergone a hospital birth already know: the use of the labor-inducing drug pitocin (synthetic oxytocin) leads to great pain and suffering, including serious adverse, unintended health effects to both mother and infant.
The best part of my departure from conventional models of psychiatric care is that I no longer have to engage women in the Sophie's Choice between treatments that may be good for mom and not for baby or vice versa. Healthy medicine relies on interventions that benefit both mom and baby at once.
Does your baby have a healthy gut? What does your baby's poop say about your infant's well-being?
Currently, suboptimal breastfeeding is associated with over a million deaths each year and 10% of the global disease burden in children. So why is the CDC aggressively fixated on vaccination instead of breastfeeding?