Hospital Birth = Risk

Sunday, NBC reported on A routine epidural turns deadly which asks, "did a hospital infection turn the happiest day of their lives into a nightmare?" A mother, amidst the bare minimum of care during her hospital stay, contracted meningitis and died within hours of birthing her son.

What bothers me most is the lack of adequate care this family received, from obstetrical decisions to staff follow through, though this is not unusual. The lack of evidence based or even adequate care is almost universal across North America to families who subject themselves to a hospital birth experience. In their defense though, most don't know what the alternatives (like traditional midwifery care) are, the excellent care and proven safety of those alternatives.

Seriously though, has "modern" (allopathic) medicine not set themselves up to "have the answers" so to speak and then be completely and utterly unable to provide them? Physicians are so confident that they can "deal with the side effects" of so many obstetrical interventions, such as inductions and epidurals, that they have not only become commonplace, many women are not even told of their risks even when being subjected to them.

We as a society have been blinded by the rhetoric and sales pitch so completely that we actually allow modern medicine to provide inadequate and often dangerous care and accept it as normal. No wonder malpractice insurance rates are through the roof. Just to compare the care the above mother received to midwifery support is laughable. Would a midwife "subject" her clients to the same care and even hope to be in business? No she would be in jail.

But obstetrics is only part of this big mess. May 29th, Businessweek article Medical Guesswork revealed, "from heart surgery to prostate care, the health industry knows little about which common treatments really work." Anne, a good friend of mine blogged about this here. I grow more leery every day when I see physicians trained to treat symptoms and be completely oblivious to the causes. I mean seriously, how else could anyone justify surgery as a solution for asthma? Evidence-based practice is a vital and very worthy goal, it's frustrating to see modern medicine miss this by such an incredibly wide margin.