whygetfat on Nostr: Dr Stu: "One of the best things a woman can do is hire a doula who keeps her at home ...
Dr Stu: "One of the best things a woman can do is hire a doula who keeps her at home until she's almost ready to push, if she really wants to birth in a hospital. Because getting to a hospital early is one of the worst mistakes you can possibly make, because they will not leave you alone. They will interrupt you. You're not moving fast enough for them.
"They'll want to do vaginal exams. Completely unnecessary. In the home-birth world I was taught by midwives (and it took me a while to unlearn a lot of the doctor stuff that I learned in my residency, in my first five or ten years in practice) that vaginal exams are often unnecessary, most often unnecessary.
"The reason they're done is because of a silly thing that happened with something called a Friedman curve, which was a curve that was designed in the '60s, I believe, maybe the '70s, by a man named Emanuel Friedman, who came up with a labor curve. Now a labor curve is something that, you know, 'All first time moms should dilate at such-and-such a rate. Here's an average rate. And the average rate is about a centimeter an hour.'
"Well, how do you know if she's dilating a centimeter an hour unless your sticking your fingers in and checking? So vaginal exams became routine.
"But the other stupid thing about it is that that line that they drew is a median. Which means that half of all women labored slower than that. And half of all women labored faster than that. And yet if women are laboring slower than that, which is about 50% of women who had labored slower than that, that's considered abnormal. Do you understand how foolish that is?
"And those women got intervened upon. They weren't moving fast enough. We need to break your bag of waters. And to start pitosin. You're not moving fast enough.
"Since when is speed a value that nature desires? Speed is an artificial value that's been put in by the medical community. What difference does it makes if a woman is laboring for 12 hours or 22 hours, if that's what nature designed for her, and everything else is going fine?"
Jerm: "So you're saying induction should be left also to the mother?"
Dr. Stu: "I'm saying that there are medical reasons to be induced, and they need to be explained to the mother. And ultimately, by the way, it's still the mother's choice to do it or not. When a doctor says your baby isn't growing well and it should come out, the woman has the right to get a second opinion and the woman has the right to say, 'I understand what you're saying doctor, but I think my baby is doing fine. I can feel my baby moving. I'm feeling that my baby is fine.'
"And that woman may be wrong. And she has to accept the fact that if she's declining recommendations that she has to accept the consequences of her actions.
"And a lot of times, because of the legal system in my country (and probably in your country as well) women choose not to follow the directions, and then when something goes wrong, they want to blame somebody else for it. That has to stop, too. That's a problem that's part of the reason why the medical model is so intervention happy, because of the fears of liability. It's a very complex web that's been woven that drives these things. And again, an individual doctor is just stuck in that matrix and cannot get out."
Dr Stuart Fischbein with Jerm @ 38:32—41:22 (recorded in 2024, posted 2025-03-06) https://podbay.fm/p/jerm-warfare-the-battle-of-ideas/e/1741328385?t=2312
"They'll want to do vaginal exams. Completely unnecessary. In the home-birth world I was taught by midwives (and it took me a while to unlearn a lot of the doctor stuff that I learned in my residency, in my first five or ten years in practice) that vaginal exams are often unnecessary, most often unnecessary.
"The reason they're done is because of a silly thing that happened with something called a Friedman curve, which was a curve that was designed in the '60s, I believe, maybe the '70s, by a man named Emanuel Friedman, who came up with a labor curve. Now a labor curve is something that, you know, 'All first time moms should dilate at such-and-such a rate. Here's an average rate. And the average rate is about a centimeter an hour.'
"Well, how do you know if she's dilating a centimeter an hour unless your sticking your fingers in and checking? So vaginal exams became routine.
"But the other stupid thing about it is that that line that they drew is a median. Which means that half of all women labored slower than that. And half of all women labored faster than that. And yet if women are laboring slower than that, which is about 50% of women who had labored slower than that, that's considered abnormal. Do you understand how foolish that is?
"And those women got intervened upon. They weren't moving fast enough. We need to break your bag of waters. And to start pitosin. You're not moving fast enough.
"Since when is speed a value that nature desires? Speed is an artificial value that's been put in by the medical community. What difference does it makes if a woman is laboring for 12 hours or 22 hours, if that's what nature designed for her, and everything else is going fine?"
Jerm: "So you're saying induction should be left also to the mother?"
Dr. Stu: "I'm saying that there are medical reasons to be induced, and they need to be explained to the mother. And ultimately, by the way, it's still the mother's choice to do it or not. When a doctor says your baby isn't growing well and it should come out, the woman has the right to get a second opinion and the woman has the right to say, 'I understand what you're saying doctor, but I think my baby is doing fine. I can feel my baby moving. I'm feeling that my baby is fine.'
"And that woman may be wrong. And she has to accept the fact that if she's declining recommendations that she has to accept the consequences of her actions.
"And a lot of times, because of the legal system in my country (and probably in your country as well) women choose not to follow the directions, and then when something goes wrong, they want to blame somebody else for it. That has to stop, too. That's a problem that's part of the reason why the medical model is so intervention happy, because of the fears of liability. It's a very complex web that's been woven that drives these things. And again, an individual doctor is just stuck in that matrix and cannot get out."
Dr Stuart Fischbein with Jerm @ 38:32—41:22 (recorded in 2024, posted 2025-03-06) https://podbay.fm/p/jerm-warfare-the-battle-of-ideas/e/1741328385?t=2312