Although there are currently few women who give birth at home in Spain (4.9 per 1000 births in 2013), the trend is growing. More and more women are fleeing hospitals because they have had bad experiences or because they do not want to play it before the possibility of being poorly respected and suffer from obstetric violence.
This escape from the hospitals it shouldn't be an escape from medicine, because if so you run the risk of ending up as a couple who tried to escape so much from her, that in the end she had to run to the hospital with his baby for a few days because he was bleeding That would have been easily avoided.
Things are done well in hospitals too
It is clear that medicine does not go through its best moment. Access to information on networks (to studies, protocols, etc.), the higher educational level of patients and the possibility of comparing what happens in our country with what happens in others makes trust in professionals Health depends largely on your way of exercising your activity, and also on your way of treating the patient.
Let's not forget that a woman who is going to give birth is not a sick woman, and as such should be treated by letting her know that she is the protagonist of her birth and the one who must make the decisions, with your partner.
But we still drag a lot of the paternalistic health model in which those in the white coat told patients what they had to do at all times to be healthy, as if their health were our responsibility, and many women, of course, have got tired.
They do not want to be told how they have to lie down, nor that they are given orders taking control of their birth, basically because they know, they have discovered that the current recommendations, the protocols, say very different things. The normal delivery strategy is public and can be read by everyone, but it is not followed in all hospitals and this is unfortunate, because there is nothing worse for a woman who wants to give birth with total security and dignity than to feel that she cannot be.
But that does not mean that everything that is done in hospitals is wrong, and there are those who in that flight has passed three villages and, as a professional theorist, has believed in possession of a truth that is not such.
What am i talking about? Well, who cared for the mother of the baby we are talking about today, who, in his denial of medicine, missed at least one more than important recommendation.
Prick your child's vitamin K? Well, no
The protocols of normal delivery say that it is advisable to administer the immediate postpartum period of vitamin K to avoid hemorrhagic disease of the newborn:
Vitamin K prophylaxis of RNs should be offered to prevent the rare, though serious and sometimes fatal vitamin K deficiency hemorrhage syndrome.
This disease occurs due to a deficit of vitamin K and occurs in 1.7% of babies in case this measure is not carried out (almost 2 out of 100, which is a lot). If this vitamin is administered, the prevalence is then 0.24-3.2 cases per 100,000 newborns.
The sequels can be serious or very serious, since cerebral hemorrhage may occur (and tissue death), or even the death of the baby.
Well, as we read in Annals of Pediatrics, the result of a home delivery, some parents had to run to the hospital with your 7 day baby because he suffered epistaxis (nosebleed) repeatedly, vomited with traces of blood and made the poops dark.
The baby he was bleeding out little by little, as they confirmed in an analysis with severe coagulation involvement, and the cause seemed clear when the parents explained that by personal decision they had not been given vitamin K.
Admission to the pediatric ICU to save your life
They had to enter the baby in the ICU where he was given intravenous vitamin K (after delivery it is given intramuscularly) and they had blood plasma transfusion. Ten hours later, coagulation was normal, confirming that if vitamin K had been applied at birth, the baby would not have needed such attention.
Luckily the scare did not go further, because they did not see that there was cerebral hemorrhage, and in subsequent visits there has been no more bleeding.
When asking the parents, they commented that they didn't know that vitamin K was so important and that they had not been informed of the risks of not administering it.
But why was it advised not to administer it?
Well, because there are professionals who, in order to differentiate themselves from what happens in the hospital, enter a spiral of denial such that they are totally passed, because they do not deny professionalism, but medicine and, apparently, the associated advances.
Perhaps it was done by studies that appeared between 1990 and 1992 (done by the same researcher) in which it was suggested that vitamin K administered intramuscularly could be associated with an increased risk of childhood cancer development (but not if it was administered orally). But if it was for this reason it is absurd, because three subsequent studies conducted by different researchers between 1998 and 2003 concluded that no relationship was seen between vitamin administration and cancer frequency.
In addition, a systematic review of studies on vitamin K and vitamin K deficiency bleeding syndrome (remember that the reviews are very reliable, because they only use serious and well-conducted studies) concluded that when children received intramuscular vitamin K the risk of bleeding was significantly lower.
So no, this entry and the one that happened in a home delivery is not an argument to deny the option of women to seek the best possible birth, even if it is given at home, but an argument for run away from those who deny all advances in medicine, putting babies and women at the same risks as our grandmothers and their predecessors, when many did not survive their own deliveries, or it was their babies who did not.
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In Babies and more | The anti-vaccines also oppose the injection of vitamin K in newborns, parents who do not trust the medicine and pay it very expensive, Vitamin K for the baby at birth: orally or intramuscularly?
