Via fark interesting article
Been there, done that.
13 minutes can make a world of difference.
Of course, I always said that if I ever had to give birth again, I was going to crawl under the front porch and birth out a baby in the dirt like the cat. She did six of them and it was a breeze (and all without a coach).
Whoop-tee-doo! The article says fuck-all about how the women felt about having some support during childbirth, which is what “coaching” is for. All it says is it doesn’t help to stand there and yell “PUSH!” at the woman. There’s a hell of a lot more involved in childbirth than pushing. Sounds like doctors trying to cut doulas out to me.
I’m more surprised they were able to find 320 women in the US that didn’t have an epidural.
Admittedly I’ve never given birth, but it’s also my understanding that the coach is there mainly for emotional support. The people responsible for helping the physical process along are the doctors, nurses and midwives.
It’s also a way to give the fathers something to do, since they can’t smoke in the hospital anymore.
3 kids, no epidural for any of 'em.
I had alot of trouble buying into the whole Lamaze thing because I was taught in nursing school that Lamaze does not impact directly on pain, it gives the woman a locus of control, which is supposed to decrease her anxiety and lessen her pain (heightened anxiety can increase pain).
If the coaching is to give the woman emotional support, I understand something that has puzzled me for years. (no, I’m not going to share it-it’s kind of OT).
I doubt that docs want to eradicate doulas. I never had a doula–but I had some great nurses help me.
Bolding mine:
Push for 10 minutes? With *every * contraction? Holy moly, that’s a lot of pushing. I don’t think I pushed for 10 minutes with any contraction, first to last. Something’s wrong there. Considering that at the final stage the contractions are timed way less than 10 minutes apart, that would be constant pushing for the last stage of labor.
Good point, MLS --don’t the contractions come every minute or so in the last stage?
I’m not an OB nurse, and memory has mercifully dimmed re the birth process…
Well, it varies all over the place, but the expectant mother, IIRC, is usually told to not bother going to the hospital until the contractions are 10 minutes apart, unless there’s some problem. And yes, in the final stages the contractions are often a minute or less apart, and lasting for the better part of that minute, so one only gets around 15 seconds or so from the end of one til the beginning of the next.
So pushing 10 mins. for each contraction is just silly. Perhaps they meant 10 seconds? That doesn’t compute either, because in the early stages any pushing at all accomplishes nothing good. Now, of course, I’m going only by my own and my friends’ experiences and stuff I’ve read, and my own experience is almost 30 years old. It’s possible that some new research has found new techniques, but it doesn’t make sense to me.
In addition, just “doing what comes naturally” is not always right. Absent preparation and coaching, many of us would become very tensed up and would push too early, resulting in more pain than necessary.
Yeah, they do, and that puzzled me too, but I figure they meant “push for a count of 10” with every contraction and just worded it incorrectly. Ten minutes per contraction is ludicrous.
We did Bradley, which IIRC, doesn’t say anything about pushing. Just encourage them over the humps. And the goal is not to medicate, not to speed things up. It’s purportedly about 90% effective in that regard, and that was anecdotally true with our class, 10 moms, 9 unmedicated births.
Lamaze is a mystery, maybe a bit of a scam IMO.
I’m not familiar with Bradley, but I found Lamaze to be very beneficial. IIRC it has the same goals: to aid in relaxation, minimize the need for medication, etc. I don’t recall any effort to speed things up, other than the concept that you don’t do anything that would slow things down.
I’m sure that there have been improvements in technique, etc., in the last 30 years, and these may now be going by a new name, but the goal IMHO is the same. Either way, it’s a vast improvement over “Shut up, bitch,” and “Oh, just give her some drugs. Who cares if the baby has depressed respiration. He’ll probably get over it.”
The presence of a significant other during labor and birth is a great comfort anyway. I know my husband did absolutely no coaching during the birth of our children, because (a) he didn’t pay much attention in the Lamaze classes anyway and (b) he forgot every detail he did learn as soon as we walked in the door of the labor room and (c) he finds anything vaguely medical kind of icky. It was great to have him there anyway.
It seemed that they have the similar goals but VERY different results re medicated births.
I can’t speak to the late stage, I had an epidural for the pushing part. But I had a bad L&D nurse. When she coached through contractions (which she did twice), it was really wonderful - a noticable difference in the amount of pain I had. But her normal technique was to let me ride the pain of the contraction doing what came naturally (which was clenching through the contraction while screaming), and then when the contraction had passed saying “it would hurt less if you relaxed through them.”
This study is measuring the objective measures - time in labor, need for c-sections. What coaching does in my experience is makes the birthing experience more pleasant for the woman. Its probably worthwhile to note that coaching doesn’t cut down on c-sections or the need for forceps, since a lot of natual childbirth advocates/doulas lobby based on that - but that is not the only worthwhile effect of coaching.
What they’re calling “coaching” in this study sounds pretty weird to me. I don’t see the point of pushing during contractions at all, unless the baby is about to be born.
Just curious, what is the source of that assessment?
I’m not a medical professional of any kind, and of course I don’t know if I would have needed medication if I hadn’t had Lamaze. Also, what is included in the category “medicated births?” Epidurals? Demerol? Pitocin?
Not saying you’re inaccurate, just wondering how this is being judged?
I agree. From my limited knowledge and experience, pushing at early stages is counterproductive. Part of what I was taught in Lamaze was how to NOT push at a time when it would have no useful effect.
It took me about 15 seconds during my wife’s first delivery to figure out that my “coaching” was completely worthless. I just gave up on it and decided to keep her company and make jokes instead. I think that being present is a good thing but the content of the conversation really makes no difference.
I had my son with no medication, and I have to say that the whole process went amazingly smoothly. Granted, I tend to deliver pretty easily anyway, but I found that Lamaze mostly was helpful as far as educating me to what was going to happen, and to teach me not to fight what I really didn’t have any control over again. Knowledge does help reduce fear, and the feeling of your body doing what the hell it wants to during childbirth is a bit overwhelming if you don’t know as much about what’s going on.
Coaching was useless, though. I appreciated the company more than needing to be told what to do. Especially when I was not in a mood to listen to it, anyway. Of course, I was lucky that I had a terrific labor nurse, which I’m convinced is possibly the most important thing in a good childbirth experience.
Worse than that even - Lamaze is actually the end result of a secret communist plot to cause problems with childbirth in non-communist nations - note that Dr. Fernand Lamaze travelled to the Soviet Union in 1951 and claims to have based his method after the child birth techniques there. Whether Dr. Lamaze was in on the conspriacy or a dupe, is unknown.