10-Second Answers To This Week's Pressing Health Questions

ICYMI Health features what we're reading this week. This week, we sought out simple answers to tough health questions. While such questions require a degree of nuance -- if they didn't, they wouldn't be tough, right? -- consider this an at-a-glance jumping off point to explore the research in more detail.    Read on and tell us in the comments: What did you read and love this week? Q: How can we reduce the United States' high C-section rate?  A: Give women more time to push. According to a study published in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology in March, giving women just one more hour to push during the second stage of labor cut the C-section rate of the 78 first-time moms in the study by half.   While the study was limited to women who'd received epidurals during childbirth, and was admittedly very small, researchers suggested that it offered a critique of our potentially outdated standard for how long doctors should allow women to labor during childbirth.  “The study really showed what we’ve seen in practice for years, which is that there can be benefits to allowing women to labor longer,” Dr. Alexis Gimovskya, study author and fellow in maternal fetal medicine at Thomas Jefferson University in Pennsylvania, previous told HuffPost.  The C-section rate in the United States is currently stands at about 30 percent, a good deal higher than the 10 to 15 percent of births that the World Health Organization r...
Source: Healthy Living - The Huffington Post - Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news