Saturday 1 February 2014

Never ask a doctor about a pain free labour.

Have just been reading Your Pregnancy Week by Week written by a professor of obstetrics and gynaecology. OMG. There is no mention of adrenalin, secreted when we are anxious or stressed, holding the cervix rigid and harder to open. This is the main cause of painful and long labours.
The word 'pain' is generously used during descriptions of all the stages of labour. The reason given that smooth muscle should cause pain in this way is that the blood supply is cut off whilst smooth muscle is contracting and so leads to "the release of painful chemical substances". I think they mean lactic acid which, if you read my post 'Why Labour Hurts - 2', you will find that the release of lactic acid is avoidable if mum is calm and not secreting adrenalin. The Author must have a constant epi-dural on the go for every time a meal is eaten and the smooth muscle in their stomach starts to contract! I bet xmas was fun.
The author does however say that caregivers should "encourage you to keep upright and active for as long as possible rather than confining you to a bed, in order to allow gravity to play its part in helping you to reach the active phase" (of labour). Well done doc, staying upright in labour, on a comfy chair or birth ball, will use the force of gravity to help keep the contractions pain free.
Your Pregnancy Week by Week is a beautiful book untill you get to labour, then the fun stops and you are convinced that you will be in PAIN, propaganda at its worse. On hypnobirthing I found the comment "you will need to be hypnotized into believing that you can control the pain of your contractions". Really?
Never ask a doctor about a pain free labour cos they do not have a clue. All that time spent at doctor school sudying human tissue and how it works has not taught them that uterine smooth muscle was never designed to cause the sensation of pain during normal use. It is the things done to us by doctors that mainly cause all the pain that they are so fond of.
When you have successfully experienced your pain free labour by relaxing and staying upright please write to your local hospital and ask them to inform the doctors that 'yes' it is possible for smooth muscle tissue to work without the release of "painful chemical substances".
All it takes is to believe, the truth.