My Daily Domestic Clips 02/04/2011 (p.m.)

• Avoiding the first c-section: 5 essential questions | BIRTH SENSE tags: birth childbirth cesarean
• Dr. Stuart Fischbein, OB/GYN responds to AGOG’s anti-home birth position – My Best Birth tags: birth childbirth ACOG
  • It seems the College relied heavily on a paper by Joseph R Wax, MD in formulating its opinions. I have written the college before regarding the use of level C evidence (consensus opinion) to dictate policy and recommendations. Those of us who truly support a woman’s right to choose her own path based on true, not skewed, informed consent know the damage that can be done by a legitimate organization like ours when it puts out an opinion. The paper by Wax and colleagues is an extremely flawed article. It has been reviewed extensively by many who express legitimate criticisms. None of which ACOG chooses to address. This study demands a critical reading. The meta-analysis of Wax, et al is the weakest type of data and should never be used as an exclusive measure of a topic. The fact that the authors cherry picked this data, including the use of one tiny study with 11 women, to prove its point while ignoring the largest studies from North America and Europe on planned homebirth demonstrates the clear bias. His paper compares apples to oranges. He goes back 40 years, mixes matched cohorts with prospective cohorts and record reviews, mixes urban and rural statistics and admits to many difficulties in interpreting this information including whether an attendant was even present and excludes many legitimate studies that do not fit his theory. His bias is evident throughout his comment section and it seems his sole negative conclusion, of a higher neonatal death rate, from this flawed study is simply mirrored and emphasized by ACOG in Committee Opinion number 476.
• Free Online English to Latin Translators tags: Latin homeschool

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.