Should Chiropractors be in the Delivery Room?
I think about my role in birth a lot.
I daydream of the day when chiropractors are not only part of the regular prenatal care, but also there on the Labor & Delivery floor to assist the midwives and birth providers. I’ve gotten that call a few times from the midwives, the last-ditch effort before she transfers to the hospital for the birth that team wanted to avoid. I even went through that with the birth of our son. I can tell you it isn’t a 100% solution, but if a laboring mom is heading north of 12 hours an adjustment is always worth a try.
As chiropractors we face some pretty obvious challenges: Hospital privileges aren’t just handed out, which is a fact true for all health professionals. Those that do accept that chiropractors are licensed professionals are fine as long as we stay in the Orthopedic or Physical Rehabilitation arena. My suspicion is that it’s our own fault as a profession because the low hanging fruit of the research tree, treating back pain, is where we have told them we belong.
I don’t really see the politics of medicine as an insurmountable hurdle. At the end of every conversation I’ve had with a medical provider, he or she understands what I do and recognizes I don’t have two heads and a tail; I’m here to help our patients, and I do so by providing conservative care. The biggest obstacles I see are actually within our own culture as a profession. First, we’d have to wrap our heads around either an on-call system or a position like one local hospital has with 24-7 OB hospitalists on staff in case of emergency.
I can also attest first-hand that introducing a mother to chiropractic for the first time while she’s in between contractions is not the easiest consultation in the world. It’s a little like teaching a driver about how to fasten her safety harness during lap 350 of the Indy 500. As she’s driving. I think most health care providers would agree that a degree of familiarity makes our jobs easier. I felt like I was flying blind when I was called to adjust mothers I’d never laid hands on before. My experience tells me that mothers who get adjusted regularly rarely need to call the chiropractor during birth. I tracked birth stats for a year and found most of my patients have pretty boring labors. The average time from contractions being 3 minutes apart and regular to the moment baby is born is 14 hours in the US. For my patients who birthed vaginally, most of them did it in under 9.
All of this remains a daydream without research. It starts with committed doctors who are willing to do a little more than run the day to day operations of their offices and start publishing the cases they’re seeing. I deeply believe I’m doing work that I’ve been called to do. I can’t really explain why, but I feel I have a responsibility to the profession and to expecting mothers to advance the work of perinatal chiropractic.
“Collaboration with midwives and chiropractors may help to resolve dystocia.” Read how http://icpa4kids.com/fwf/2016%20Newsletters/Research_July2016.pdf