BIRTHING: HIGH TECH OR HIGH TOUCH?
Will she have that baby the high-tech, low-touch way or the high-touch, low-tech way? This is Dr. Steven Andrew Davis, Speaking of Health.
Some physicians don’t see an issue in it at all; others view it has a major philosophical difference in the way children are brought into this world. On the one hand, you have highly trained obstetricians working in state-of-the-art specialty units full of monitoring and complication care instruments who, rightly or wrongly, have been accused of more dependence on technology and less on personal interactin with the patient. On the other hand there are obstetricians claiming a more “natural” approach to child birth along with a number of family physicians in favor of what has been called “low-intervention care”. Some proponents say that low-intervention care “is all that is needed in women undergoing normal birthing in hospitals.”
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>It may be that the division between the high touch and low touch schools is not as sharp as the critics of low-touch claim. Certainly, many highly trained obstetricians encourage natural birthing processes, and recent trends, even in hospitals, has been toward family-centered birthing.
So today, whether the issue is real or a turf war between obstetricians and family doctors, pregnant women and their families will likely be shown increasing sensitivity toward their needs – both physical and psychological – when the baby is due. Speaking of
Health, I’m Dr. Steven Andrew Davis for CBS News.
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