Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Family Doctor Blog

I found this fantastic blog several months ago, then lost the address and wasn't sure if I'd ever find it again. Well, here it is: FPMama. She's a family doc who attends hospital births and writes about them. This physician is very respectful of normal birth physiology and does things quite differently than the Standard American Birth (she advocates mother-directed pushing, no mother-baby separation, very hands-off, etc). It's interesting to read how often, this doctor wants her clients to have peaceful, non-interventive, natural births--but the clients demand the medicalized care. It would be a hard place to be in, knowing how certain interventions are likely to lead to less-than-desirable outcomes, but not being able to convince your clients otherwise. The story "A Tale of Two Friends" illustrates this quite well.

Two of her recent posts are particularly good reads: "The Epidural Queen" and "What If You Never Saw a Birth Like This?"

6 comments:

  1. What an incredibly powerful blog. I read the two posts you linked to, and I will definitely go back to it later and read the rest. I wish all OBs were like this!

    A friend linked me to an OB's chat room once to show a thread she had seen about how callous many docs are regarding women being traumatized by C-sections. Although it's true that the majority of the OBs who posted thought it was just women being their typical drama-queen selves over a simple operation, several OBs wished they could stick to handling real emergencies and leave birth to midwives (this was when the conversation veered away from C-sections and towards discussion of birth itself). I was glad to read those comments, but saddened at the same time. In my childbirth class, out of 20-odd moms-to-be, I was the only one seeing a midwife. How backwards is that?

    -Jill

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  2. Yes, it's great, isn't it? I admire people who can work in such settings. I don't think I could. I would get too frustrated. Even being a doula for hospital births was hard. Even at the best of births, the institutional inertia itself--nurses' obligation to "do" so many things that interfered with labor and postpartum, for example--was astounding.

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  3. What an amazing doctor - I went back and read a lot of the archives and I am just so admiring of her philosophy and achievements, particularly with the very young mothers she works with. They're very lucky to have a doctor like her, when they could so easily end up with someone who judged them and with the whole gamut of medical interference.

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  4. I'm impressed. I've read everything on the first page, and I will definitely be reading further into the archives. I really like her style. Very different from the run-of-the-mill OBs.

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  5. Cool! Glad to see that there are some "midwives in disguise" working in hospitals! My backup doc who my homebirth midwife referred me to for tests was like this; in fact he even still did vaginal breech births in certain circumstances! He is so laid-back.

    And that doc is SOOOO right about the women WANTING intervention; where I live the local Army hospital won't induce you unless there is a medical reason or you hit 42 weeks and you won't believe how many women actually COMPLAIN about that! Waaah, my mom is in town, why won't those awful doctors induce me? I think I am the only mother I know who did NOT want an unnecessary induction!

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  6. Her blog seems down, I hope it can be located again, it was so inspirational!

    Oana

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