Labour Pain Relief Approaches Women Have Used Throughout History

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Over the time that humans have been on this Earth, different methods of labour pain relief have come and gone. Only in the last hundred years or so has it been taken as a given that each new mother will use chemical, medical means in order to reduce pain during birthing.

Looking back at the whole course of history, it is actually very surprising to see how quickly and how firmly the concept of a medically supervised birth came on. Going back a little more than a hundred years, one would see a very different picture at practically all births.

For most of time as we know it, birthing was facilitated for a new mother by women that she knew and trusted. This would usually include a midwife, who was experienced in all matters related to the physical birthing process and who would take the lead on the delivery.

Midwives were highly respected figures who were trusted and consulted not only during pregnancy and birth, but in many cases, long afterwards. They would provide advice and guidance that would help the new mother acclimate to her role.

Nowadays, birth is often facilitated by medical professionals that a new mother might not know well or at all. Most methods of labour pain relief rely on medical drugs, but there are other ways mothers can reduce pain themselves.

Let’s look at a few:

1. Aromatherapy

Any sensory stimulation that provokes a sense of peace and tranquility can be useful when trying to soothe the pain related to birthing. Aromatherapy is a scientifically proven, yet ancient healing modality that allows the body to react in a calm and positive way fast.

2. Music

Many different types of music, such as classical music, are known for their relaxing properties. If a birthing environment is kept relaxing and calming, this can help the mother keep her own body from becoming tense and potentially prolonging the birthing process.

3. Visualization

The power of the mind to reduce pain has been documented well. It is not necessary to be a trained monk or other expert in order to redirect the mind away from pain, however. Simply learning to concentrate the mind on specific, peaceful images can help.

4. Breathing Techniques

Breathing fully and deeply is important for a wide variety of activities. Reduced breathing is associated with all experiences of pain and anxiety. Learning to control breathing while under stress can greatly enhance the birth experience.

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Labour

Preparing Your Body For Labour

You wouldn’t go for a five kilometer run without some advance training and a specialised diet. Neither should you anticipate labour without spending adequate time preparing. Few people spend much time thinking about physical resistance exercises and stretching, but this is exactly what you should do to help your body prepare. In addition, the right diet can help give you muscular support so that your body is in peak shape when “race day” arrives.

Diet

Protein and fibre are both crucial and lacking in most pregnant women’s diets. After all, it is easy to get calcium. This is present in milk and many vegetable milks and fruit juices are fortified with it, as well. Carbohydrate are also in abundant supply. They are located in many healthy foods, including potatoes, bananas, and obviously well supplied in breads and grains, let alone the sugar in your coffee and soda. Fats require very little effort to get enough of, as well.

Many packaged products contain a great deal of fat to make them taste good. Fiber, though present to some degree in many foods, is especially important for bowel health. For pregnant women especially, it is of utmost importance to get enough fiber to reduce the likelihood of hemorrhoids. Although these are typically annoying regardless of pregnancy status, they can develop bleeding fissures and actually become so painful that they make the delivery of the baby extremely painful during crowning. These fissures can increase the risk of a large tear and can even cause so much pain during examinations that they prevent the doctor from checking the condition of the cervix. Protein is important to support muscles that are being stretched and will be putting forth a lot of effort to bring a baby into the world.

Exercises

Walking is wonderful exercise for pregnant as it does not put a lot of stress on the joints but still gets the blood flowing. However, there are other options for exercise and stretches that can reduce discomfort at delivery. Tailor sitting, or squatting down with the feet flat on the floor and leaned far enough forward that the buttocks do not touch the floor, is a great way to stretch the muscles that will have to stretch for the delivery of the baby. Many women find that this exercise reduces discomfort as the baby moves down during labour, as well.

Do not be afraid to use the internet and search up some other valuable exercises. There are many sample pregnancy diets available as well, and you can print them off to get your physician’s okay. Be sure to have your physician evaluate all diets and exercises that you want to do before you start in on a regimen.

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Labor Pain Symptoms

Labor Pain Symptoms - How Painful is Labor?

 

Just as every pregnancy is different, every labor is different, too. In addition, each person has a different and subjective view of how pain is interpreted. For some people, labor might be no more painful than a typical monthly period whereas for others, it would rank somewhere above dental surgery with no anesthesia. There are many factors that contribute to how painful a labor is considered to be and whether or not labor pain symptoms are tolerable without anesthesia of some kind.

Relative Restfulness Of The Mother

Almost any task is easier if you are well rested to begin with and bringing a child into the world is no exception. Almost no woman goes into labor perfectly well rested due to the increasing frequency of Braxton Hicks contractions and getting up to go to the bathroom at least once in the night. However, going into labor mid-morning after a decent night’s rest is usually considered to be much easier than going into labor at midnight after a shopping marathon or exhausting family holiday celebration.

Pain Tolerance

For some people, pain tolerance is just part of their make-up. If you are someone who runs to the medicine cabinet at the first hint of a headache, then you probably have a low pain tolerance. However, that is not to say that an unmedicated labor is impossible for someone with a low pain tolerance. There are many other factors that go into the perception of how painful labor is.

What Are You Scared Of?

Fear brings tension with it, and tension is the enemy of an effective labor. For the body to prepare to deliver the baby, the cervix has to relax. If you are scared stiff, you will be continually working against your own bodily processes. Learning as much as you can about the labor process can help you take the fear out of the experience. In addition, it can be worthwhile for you to spend time learning relaxation techniques. When you feel your jaw begin to clench up during the laboring process, you can employ the learned techniques to help you relax throughout contractions. Any experienced mother will tell you that relaxation is the key to an unmedicated labor.

The size of the baby relative to the birth canal and a few other physical factors, including the position of the baby, can affect how painful your particular labor is as well as your labor pain symptoms. Much of the perception of pain is affected by how painful the mother expects the experience to be and how tense or relaxed she is during the process.

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Labour Pain Relief

The body is an amazing thing, even beyond the fact that it is the physical aspect of life, but that it is resilient through pain and trauma, as well as wired in such a way that an action in one area can create a response in an entirely different place.  Added to this is the fact that women are able to gestate the formation of life and bring that life to fruition after the arduous task of labour.  The miracle, then, is not just the emergence of a child, but also the body that can do so.

Natural childbirth is becoming more popular, as people shy away from immediately subjecting their child to the petri dish of diseases in hospitals, or if they want the birth of their offspring to be private and personal, rather than public and coldly clinical.  Some mothers who have gone down either path attest to the fact that natural birth not only changed the experience for them, but seems to show itself in a more positive personality in their child.  Natural childbirth, though, does come with the same pains of labour, although methods that do not include drugs and chemicals may still be utilized to help the mother see her way through the ordeal.

The most common form of pain management for natural birthing is the use of a breathing technique which can incorporate visualizations to shift the focus away from the pain.  Breathing exercises were originally thought to distract the mother from the pain by giving her another task to keep occupied with, and the breath count is linked to the times of contraction in order to synchronize the physiological processes and make labour less physically taxing, providing much labour pain relief.  However, respiration and the acuteness of pain are linked, as controlled respiration can mimic the effects of exercise and release natural pain relieving endorphins through the body.  This moves breathing beyond a mental form of pain relief and provides true physical benefit as well.

Other natural pain management is based on the way that nerve receptors connect within the body.  In much the same way that acupuncture or reflexology can elicit a response in one part of the body by activating or relaxing muscles in another, these forms of natural pain relief rely on similar principles.  The main nerves and blood vessels are affected by tension in the jaw and facial area, since they run on either side of the neck.  The ability to keep the jaw relaxed during labour will change the way pain is received from the nerves that link to the abdominal area.  In the same way that breathing is more than focus and is an actual physiological reaction, the easing of jaw tension provides another proven method of labour pain relief 

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