andrewducker: (Default)
andrewducker ([personal profile] andrewducker) wrote2011-11-25 11:00 am
  • Add Memory
  • Share This Entry
Entry tags:

Interesting Links for 25-11-2011

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[identity profile] alitheapipkin.livejournal.com 2011-11-25 04:53 pm (UTC)(link)
Yes this. By their nature these things miss out the personal experience bit. I know two women who opted to give birth at home for their first child. Neither of them are stupid, they both did their research and decided the added comfort and reduced medicalisation outweighed the extra risk. They were both lucky enough to have no complications and found birth a more positive experience than several other women I know, who had a horrible time in hospital. Including one who still had to wait for an ambulance and be transferred because the hospital she was in couldn't perform the necessary intervention.

By which I mean that if we rely on people's gut feelings and personal experience, we get a story based entirely on who is in our sample.

[identity profile] dalglir.livejournal.com 2011-11-25 06:55 pm (UTC)(link)
It turns out that I am an opinionated old fart, lucky enough to have friends like Andy who are patient enough to keep arguing their corner. The result was that I went away, read some more around the topic and am now more sympathetic to other point of view.

Hurray!

[identity profile] alitheapipkin.livejournal.com 2011-11-25 07:16 pm (UTC)(link)
I can entirely sympathise with your position given your experience, it's very hard to be objective about medical statistics when it's you or your family whose lives are saved (I made a similar point here about mammograms).
andrewducker: (Default)

[personal profile] andrewducker 2011-11-25 07:42 pm (UTC)(link)
I should point out that I think your approach is absolutely defensible, that 0.5/100 is perfectly common enough to be worried about, and that I'm sure there are cases where being right next to a bunch of doctors has saved people's lives.

Which leads me to think that either there _is_ something wrong in the statistics or there must be cases where being in a hospital is actively bad for your health (like increased chance of catching something nasty, or passing doctor's deciding to run experiments on you).

[identity profile] alitheapipkin.livejournal.com 2011-11-25 08:15 pm (UTC)(link)
As well as the chances of catching MRSA etc, hospital births tend to be 60 % longer, which can increase the chances of complications. In a hospital, a woman is more likely to give birth on her back (not helped by a lot of medical professionals who think you need to be lying down if you have monitors attached to you) which is apparently much worse than squatting.

(This info is via the Boy who is training to be a nurse; I'd look up some articles to reference but a) I should be working or turning the laptop off and b) no-one without a journal subscription is likely to be able to read them)

I'm unclear whether the data on the length of hospital births is comparing like-for-like births, or whether it is affected by higher risk births being almost entirely hospital based, unfortunately.
Flat | Top-Level Comments Only