September Man of the Month: Dr. Neel Shah

September’s Man of the Month is Dr. Neel Shah. Dr. Shah gave us permission to crosspost his article below which was first published in June on The Conversation. Dr. Shah was also recently featured in this Boston Globe article. In the article below he makes the argument that giving birth outside a hospital with a midwife could be safer and cheaper for many American women. Are hospitals the safest place for healthy women to have babies? An obstetrician thinks twice There is a good chance that your grandparents were born at home. I am going to go ahead and assume they turned out fine, or at least fine enough, since you were eventually born too and are now reading this. But since the late 1960s, very few babies in the United Kingdom or the United States have been born outside of hospitals. As a result, you may find the new guidelines from the UK’s National Institutes for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) just as surprising as I did. For many healthy women, the NICE guidelines authors believe, there may be significant benefits to going back to the way things were. Shortly after the NICE guidelines were issued, the New England Journal of Medicine invited me to write a response. The idea that any pregnant patient might be safer giving birth outside the hospital seemed heretical, at least to an American obstetrician like me. Knowing that no study or guideline is foolproof, I began my task by looking for holes to form a rebuttal. I soon realized that this rebuttal largely hi...
Source: Disruptive Women in Health Care - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Childbirth Choice Man of the Month Quality Source Type: blogs