Michel Odent Reviews my Book…
I asked Michel Odent to review my book, The Basic Needs of a Woman in Labour. Who is Michel Odent? Dr. Odent started his medical career as a surgeon and became involved in birth when he was put in charge of a hospital in Pithiviers, outside Paris. He soon realised that hospitals were not conducive to a woman in labour. They were too bright, sterile and uncomfortable and lacked privacy. He was the first person to introduce low beds (easier for a labouring woman to climb in and out of), dim lighting, beautiful home-like rooms, and eventually water as a form of pain relief, in a hospital setting. The hospital in Pithiviers was so successful that many people came specially to have their babies there. Dr. Odent was there from 1962 to 1985. He worked with six midwives and oversaw approximately 1000 births per year. The hospital’s maternity section had excellent statistics with low rates of intervention. He eventually moved to London and became a home birth midwife there. Again, he was able to make many interesting observations through his experience there. Later he founded the Primal Health Research Centre He works with a doula called Liliana Lammers. Together they run the Paramana Doula course in London. Liliana is a quiet and unassuming woman who holds an incredible strength in doing very little at a birth. She is able to hold a space with her presence alone, a quiet strength. She must make a woman feel very safe in labour. Through his many years (more than half a century) of attending births (around 15 000 births) in both hospitals and at home, Dr. Odent has come to the conclusion that a labouring woman needs not much more than to be left alone, simply to be attended to by a quiet, non-invasive and low profile midwife. The little 24 page booklet I wrote is a summary of what I have learned from attending Michel Odent and Liliana Lammer’s course in December 2010, by reading Michel’s books, and from my own experience and work with pregnant and labouring women. I received his feedback a few days ago…I am honoured and humbled by his feedback and it took me a few days to process the immensity of his review before I could bring myself to share it. Here it is: There are two important published documents about birth physiology and the basic needs of labouring women. The first one is an enormous book written thousands of years ago. In the very first pages of this bestseller, there are some lines suggesting an association between the consumption of the fruit of the tree of knowledge (translate knowing too much or having developed a powerful neocortex) and the difficulties of human birth. At the end of this book, we can read about the birth of a legendary man whose mission was to promote love. His mother found a strategy to overcome the human handicap: with humility she gave birth among non-human mammals, in a stable. The second document is the opposite of the first one in terms of size. It is a booklet by Ruth Ehrhrardt. To bring together what is important in such a small number of pages is a feat. I hope that, on the five continents, all pregnant women, midwives, doulas, doctors, etc. will take the time to assimilate the contents of this chef d’oeuvre: it will be a turning point in the history of childbirth and therefore in the history of mankind. – Michel Odent...
Read MoreMeeting a Traditional Midwife in Malawi
Marianne Littlejohn and I volunteer for Operation Smile by teaching the Helping Babies Breathe (HBB) programme. In June of 2014 we were flown to Malawi to teach at the Kamuzu Central Hospital in Lilongwe . Over five days we taught approximately 40 people each. Malawi is an amazing country. It is incredibly poor but we were really pleasantly surprised by the hospitality and kindness and receptiveness of everyone we met. What I love about the HBB programme is its focus on normal birth, its simplicity and its adaptability to whatever environment it is presented in. We have so far taught in high tech hospitals, to home birth midwives, low resourced settings, to doulas and mothers. Each course is different because it works with the experiences and environments the people being taught bring to the workshops. Kamuzu Central Hospital is a reasonably well equipped hospital with sensitive and compassionate midwives. Some of the people we taught were very experienced midwives, doctors and paediatric nurses with many years of experience with very compromised babies. There was interesting discussion and sharing of stories and knowledge – we definitely learned a lot from the people who attended these workshops. One of the women we taught, Violet, a highly experienced midwife, told us about the work she used to do providing training and education and equipment to Traditional Birth Attendants (TBAs) in her region. TBA is the term used to describe traditional or lay midwives who have no ‘officially’ recognised training. Usually they have learned their skills from other traditional midwives. It is a controversial title as it takes away the centuries old title of ‘midwife’ from those women who have always attended pregnant and labouring women and who often carry skills and knowledge passed down through generations. Violet told us about a TBA living in a village not far from Lilongwe and offered to take us to meet her if we could organise the transport. The following day we organised a car and a driver and were driven about 45 minutes outside of Lilongwe over dusty and bumpy clay coloured roads, past simple handmade clay brick homes and thorn trees and goats and women wearing colourful cloth skirts. Along the way, Violet told us that TBAs had been the backbone of maternal care for a very long time in Malawi. She told us that the Malawian government had trained many TBAs in basic midwifery skills to provide care for pregnant and labouring women. The government had also provided updates and further education every month to the TBAs to ensure their skills were kept up to date. The government had also provided the TBAs with equipment and medications. It had been Violet’s job to provide these updates and education to ensure that the TBAs were following best practice when caring for pregnant and labouring women. Violet’s duties had also been to ensure that the TBAs were stocked with the medicines and equipment they needed. She had enjoyed this work. She had enjoyed the travelling and admired the TBAs she was responsible for. Two years previously, in a drive to encourage women to seek care from hospitals, the Malawian government had banned TBAs. This had not really changed the birth statistics in the hospitals, Violet said, all it had done was driven the TBAs underground and yet most rural women still sought care from the TBAs they knew and had grown up with, and who had probably attended their mothers when they themselves were born. Lack of transport to the hospitals made it difficult for mothers to get to the hospitals even if they wanted to. The government...
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