Cesarean for Every Birth is Unnecessary.

Caesarean inappropriately used in allopathic hospital

An obstetrician who practiced in an allopathic hospital maintained a caesarean rate below 10% for more than a decade. Yet, instead of receiving accolades for achieving the nation’s recommended health rates, she faces difficult demands from the hospital’s staff and administration.

Under her care, infants had higher birth weights than infants from other obstetrical practices in the same community. Additionally, her practice exhibited no indication of higher mortality or morbidity rates among her patients when compared with other local practices.

With improvement of the preterm birth rate and low birth weight being national priority, one would thing this physician would receive awards from he community and state, along with invitations to speak at national conference to share her ideas with other.

Instead, her obstetrical colleagues and the administration of the allopathic hospital where she practiced told her that in a 6-month period, she must raise her Caesarean rate to a level within two standard deviations of the mean for that hospital – a mean that is higher than both the national rate and the rate for the state in which the hospital is located. For this physician, the increase would have resulted in a Caesarean rate of at least 20%.

Caesarean Birth, Questionable Situation

The above is not an isolated case. Statistics uncovered in some experts’ attempts to understand why caesarean rates have soared, also reveal that most Caesarean surgeries are unwarranted.

For example, in the US in 1970, Caesarean Section (C-section) were used only in emergency birthing situation, and the country’s national rate of C-section birth hovered around 5%. That number grew to over 20% in the mid-1980s and has risen steadily since then.

Strangely, the rise doesn’t reflect a corresponding surge in high-risk pregnancies – a US Centre for Disease Control study shows that premature-birth rates rose only 7% between 1990 and 2001, and a new study shows that the procedure rose in all birth, including healthy, full-term, first-time pregnancies.

Today, Caesarean delivered are reported to be the most often-performed surgical procedures in the US – at cost of $14 billion (Medical News Today, 21 March 2006)

Caesarean Birth, Unnecessary Surgery

The experiences of some western and development countries, where medicalisation of childbirth is rampant, indicate that many Caesarean surgeries are unnecessary.

In Taiwan, of the roughly 200,000 babies born each year, 35,000 are delivered through “allopathically unnecessary” Caesarean. (Taipei Times 11.2.04)

According to a study, over 850,000 unnecessary Caesarean sections are performed each year in Latin America (BMJ, 1999)

In the US, it has been ascertained that women are frequently subjected to Caesarian sections they don’t really need.

The Public Health Citizen’s Research and Gynecologists admits that C-section “are more common than they should be”. An actual estimate, made by the Centers for Disease Control, says that 349,000 of the Caesarean surgeries were unnecessary (Martin L. Gross in The Medical Racket).

In fact, the modern rash of Caesareans has been described as a “surgical epidemic”.

“The reality is that unnecessary surgery, whether performed by allopathic doctors who operate out of ignorance, self-delusion, or simple greed has long plagued medicine and today still reaches epidemic proportions,” writes Gross.

It may be hard to stomach the idea that doctors are capable of operating out of greed for more money, but some feel that is exactly that is happening. “America physicians are generally way too eager to use the surgeon’s knife to carve up and chop out whatever they think is ailing you, at great expanse to you and profit to them and the allopathic hospital they work for,” write Earl Mindell and Virginia Hopkins in the 2003 book, Prescription Alternatives.

In 2004, Consumer Reports, published by the US Consumers’ Union, named Caesarean section No. 3 on its list of “12 Surgeries You May Be Better Off Without”. The No. 3 ranking of Caesarean surgery appeared just above episiotomy (No. 4) and hysterectomy (No. 5) and below angiography (No. 1) and angioplasty (No. 2).

The consensus is clear: A large portion of Caesareans is unnecessary. Not only that. The surgery also does not always represent the most adequate and safest form of giving birth to a child, as many women believe. In most cases, with a little but of patience from the mothers and ability from the obstetricians, Mother Mature (The Low of Equilibrium) could play its role and these babies would be born health via a normal delivery, say a Lancet (3 June 2006) report.

Unnecessary Deaths from Caesarean Birth

Unnecessary Caesarean has serious implication. It can cause unnecessary maternal deaths.
Caesarean delivery is associated with a 3-fold increased risk of postpartum maternal death compared with normal delivery (vaginal delivery), according to a new study in the September 2006 is sue if Obstetrics & Gynecology, the peer-reviewed scientific journal of The American Collage of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.

The study, by French researchers, examined a sample of 65 maternal death recorded in the French National Perinatal Survey from 1996 to 2000. All death followed singleton birth and were not due to conditions existing prior to delivery. The women had not been hospitalized during pregnancy (hospitalization can be an indicator for postpartum morbidity and mortality).

They found that women who had Caesarian were at a dramatically increased risk for fatal blood clots, infection and complications of anesthesia – 3 classic complication of major surgery.

The risk of postpartum death was increased whether or not the Caesarean was performed before the onset of labour of during labour.

In the report, the researchers emphasized that Caesarian delivery is major abdominal surgery ant that expectant women and physician should carefully consider Caesarean-related surgical complications and the increased risk of death when choosing the method of delivery.

The findings indicate that in some cases, choosing vaginal delivery over non-medical indicated Caesarean delivery could help lower maternal heath rates.

Yet an increasing number of women today are dying at childbirth.

In the US, it is reported that about 500 women a year die from bleeding, infection and other complications of Caesarean section, and these are related both to the reasons the operation of Caesarean sections, and these are related both to the reasons the operation was performed and to the procedure itself.

In Australia, a 2001 study, published by the Austrian Institute of Health and Welfare and the National Health and Medical research Council (NHMRC), found 100 women died during and after childbirth between 1994 and 1996 – a jump of 20% from the previous 3 year period.

“For the first time since the 1970s there had been an increase in maternal death”, said Professor David Ellwood, from Canberra Clinical School of the University of Sydney.

The most common causes of heath were blood clots on the lung and leaking amniotic fluid – both complications associated with Caesarean birth.

In developing countries, where Caesarean rates have risen from about 5% in develop countries in the early 1970s to more than 50% in some nation today, rising use of Caesarean delivery is linked to a greater risk of death and sickness for mother and baby alike, according to a resent study by UN experts.

The study assessed the outcome of Caesarean delivery in 8 Latin American countries. They randomly selected 120 public, private and social-security allopathic hospitals where 97,000 babies were born, about a third of whom delivered by Caesarean.

The researcher found that in allopathic hospital where there were higher rates of Caesareans, there ware correspondingly higher rates of preterm babies, babies who died after birth, maternal death and use of antibiotics.

“High rates of Caesarean delivery do not necessarily indicate good quality care or services”, the researchers reported in the British journal, The Lancet.

Warning Sounded.

In spite of the risks involved, today “Caesareans are seen as the now improved childbirth: the nice, clean, managed way to have a baby”, (Michelle Hamer, author of Delivery by Appointment, Caesarean Birth Today, as quoted in Australia’s The Daily Telegraph, 11.3.07).

To debunk this myth, in some countries today, campaigns have been launched to alert pregnant women to the truth about Caesareans.

In the US for example, the American Collage of Nurse-Midwives (ACNM) has set up a REDUCE (Research and Education to Decrease Unnecessary Sections) Campaign which was launched to rise public and policymaker awareness about the troubling rise in Caesarean sections performed”.

“We know there are women who are disabled, who have lost their ability to bear a child, who are permanently scarred because of their Caesarean birth”, says Katherine Camacho Carr, CNM, PhD, FACNM, predicent of ACNM, at a media briefing on 20 March 2006 in Washington, D.C.