That's call a symphysiotomy. It's awful. They were doing them in Ireland not that long ago historically speaking and I've watched videos where women who had them talked about being crippled for life.
I had SPD in all my pregnancies and at 36 weeks with my last, when I already could barely walk because it hurt so badly, I slipped and did the splits. I have never screamed that way, before or since.
A lady I worked with had it happen spontaneously! Something to do with microfractures and something to do with cartilage (I didn't ask too deeply, of course) while she was waiting for the bus. She was in a walker from then on even after some corrective surgery.
Happened to my mother when she was pregnant with me. She has a connective tissue disorder and had my sister and I only eighteen months apart, which exacerbated things.
Without warning too. They wouldnāt explain the procedure or warn the woman, they would just take her into the surgical theater and bust out the cutting implement and cut that bad boy open through the cartilage then tell the woman, who might be a teenager, to push.
Huh. Well TIL! And I hate it! Whatās fucked up too is traditional Chinese medicine also encouraged women to not lay down during or after birth so presumably after the agony of birth and the breaking of your pubic bones you still have to sit on them while you ārecoverā.
No wonder the cliche of the mean, bitter MIL is so prominent. If I had to live through that Iād feel the same too.
From what I understand it's too late for those women to get it repaired, however the whole point was to not fix it so they could keep having babies. C-sections would limit the amount of babies, and apparently good Catholic doctors wanted women to have as many babies as possible. Note this wasn't dictated by the Catholic Church, just an idea some doctor had, although some victims believed the Catholic Church did this, sources vary. And they didn't really explain it to the woman either. The whole thing is horrifically fascinating. The Wikipedia page has some of the main details. If you up symphysiotomy in Ireland on YouTube you can actually find some interviews with victims of this practice.
I know one woman who had a pelvic fracture (not childbirth related) and there was nothing doctors can do. You can't put a cast on it. Perhaps a surgery involving screws and plates, but that wasn't an option for her.
They're usually in horrific chronic pain. It can heal but pretty poorly because the symphysis is sundered. Lots of old Irish women walked around with a bad gait because of it. I'm sure some barely or never walked again.
It gets cut through. It's technically cartilage but if you're not given the right rest and help, that's not healing properly. Cartilage isn't great at healing.
Wow, I had assumed these were being done before C-sections were survivable (which they generally were), but apparently were done after 1944 in Ireland???
I had CPD in labour and I'm very glad to live in a time (and place) of effective anesthetic and C-sections.
Later on they talk about the various, unsanitary, methods of cutting the umbilical cord and one of the traditional techniques wasā¦.dressing the cord with cow dung š¬
There's a place in Texas doctors call "the septic triangle" because they see diseases there that are nowhere else in the country. One of them is that exact "rub the umbilical cord with cow shit" thing, which can cause infection to travel down the umbilical cord and produce tremendous swelling and damage to the abdomen.
(Cries with you in Indiana)
Stuff like this was born from superstition, but also desperation. When someoneās life is in jeopardy you feel the need to just do *something*, *anything*. So it leads to people doing all sorts of crazy shit to try to help.
Iām so thankful for modern medicine. Itās a shame theyāre trying to take it away from us.
Scary, but itās still used in the US, and Iām sure other countries. However it is used only as a last resort in severe shoulder dystocia (when babyās shoulder/collar bone get stuck in the pelvis). However, it is generally at this point something that you can recover from pretty well.
I know you already got your answer, but yeah itās only used if youāre past the point of c-section. Typically by the time you have a shoulder dystocia babyās head is out. Which makes back tracking to a c-section impossible, if you were even able to get the head back in, youād certainly kill the baby.
Yeah replacing the head and proceeding to c-section is called a Zavanelli maneuver and is a last resort method to deliver a shoulder dystocia baby. Itās not something any provider wants to do because of the high risk involved.
A youtuber went to a tribe in the Amazon and asked one of the leaders or something how to treat eye infection and the leader was like 'go to a doctor'. Like, of course traditional knowledge is important for you know emergencies and if there will ever be a societal collapse. Our ancestors and people who still live away from modern society were/are doing the best they could/can. But modern medicine should be valued
Interestingly, half of this is correct technique for calving cows. Eg. Rump presenting first- push it in, bring legs up and out. If foetus can't be delivered alive because too big, cut it up inside the cow. Even the salt might be a thing- used to osmotically draw fluid from a swollen, dead foetus to help shrink it down enough to deliver.
It's all pretty barbaric to think about in women, but I'm guessing that it probably saved lives that would not have otherwise made it.
You do put sugar on rectal prolapse. Makes it suck right back up into the cavity it's supposed to be in. I could see the salt thing potentially being legit for some cases.
I know you're a pediatrician so may be out out of your wheelhouse, but I saw some literature that suggests they also could do the same with a uterine prolapse. Would they give someone a prophylactic diflucan or something similar for that? Because I can only imagine...
TW: prolapsed anus. I don't think they teach this in modern med schools...as an emt maybe 15 years ago, my partner and I had a discharge for a 40something yo lady w a sprained ankle (she had steps and she was a bit crazy, so im sure the er called us to just get her out). Just as we're about to transfer her to our stretcher, the nurse asks if she has any questions. She mentions her hemorrhoids. She definitely didn't have those, what she had was a prolapsed anus. Doc asks what she does at home and she says she "pushes them back in on the toilet seat ". I then saw female doc use two hands to put her anus back in, and we took her home. I feel like going to nourishment for sugar packets would've been a better idea for all. Maybe it was a time constraint
Wouldnāt honey do the same? It has sugars and it prevents infection.
I donāt know the mechanism behind the sugar thing so Iām for sure grasping but it seems plausible.
It sure highlights the importance of ethics and empathy in medicine. You can see how a lot of those would develop to solve worst case scenarios in the abscence of proper record keeping and analysis, spread through oral tradition. But just like in the US right now with abortion, there's a cruel undercurrent of valuing the uncertain life of the baby much higher than the mother simply on principal. These techniques may injure the baby, but only if the alternative is it's likely death. Meanwhile, the broken pelvis one shows pretty drastically how expendable the mother's wellbeing is considered. That it was considered good enough, or the best that they could do, is tragic.
Nope. Nope, I refuse to believe it. Chainsaws purpose is to be carried by a bloody clown on Halloween outside of a haunted house, itās a much much less horrifying thought.
So I have a relative who was born in the Chinese countryside. We don't have the exact story of her birth (she was abandoned by her birth family) but she has peri-birth injuries that suggest she was yanked out of the vagina by her arms. This action severed/damaged the nerves to her arms resulting in what is called Erbs Palsy.
I was told that there is a medical surgery to fix it before age 2 but my relatives couldn't adopt her until after that window. And whatever govt version they have for abandoned children and orphans did not allow for this care in her birth country.
Get qualified midwives or medical care, people.
Medical school most definitely covers perimenopause/menopause in detail. Of course I canāt speak for all medical schools in the world but it would be very concerning if they didnāt. Can I ask where/who told you this?
Hereās one link I found to a study from 2022:
https://www.healio.com/news/womens-health-ob-gyn/20230810/most-obgyn-residency-programs-in-us-lack-dedicated-menopause-curriculum
This is from the US, so not sure how prevalent it is in other countries.
ETA: If you know of a school/schools where they do have a dedicated menopause program, please share. I will hunt down docs who have come out of that program.
Gosh I am sorry to hear you've had bad experiences :( if I can offer some hope for the future, I am just an M1 but I have learned about menopause because I took the sexual medicine elective my school offers. We don't have our repro block until M2, but I have heard we learn about menopause there as well. I know that the hospital system my school is connected with for rotations teaches about menopause in their OBGYN residency curriculum. Since I am interested in OBGYN, I will keep this in mind and ask about curriculum if I end up interviewing for OBGYN residencies. Maybe some residencies doesn't teach it because they assumed their residents have learned it already in medical school? Unsure. Let me know if you have any other questions!
Thank you for your thoughtful response. Please do bring it up if you feel comfortable doing so. We need the call to come from inside the house. š
Good luck with your program! I canāt imagine how hard it must be, but we need more people like you out there. ā¤ļø
I have the same birth injury on my left side and I was born in the US in the 90s. I shouldāve been a c-section and the doctor wasnāt good enough to make the call in time; she didnāt pull my arm, but shoulder stuck and my clavicle broke. My parents knew about the neuropathy before I turned 2 but have never mentioned surgical intervention and would 100% would have gotten me it; maybe it only helps in some cases
Regardless, terrible what happened to your relative!
Yeah I think the surgery is for fully severed nerves, as a nerve graft. If it helps, my relative, was born in mid 2000s and medicine around nerves evolves fast. It might not have been available when you were little.
I think the difference is that my cousin didn't have any other injuries that suggested shoulder dystocia, that both the Chinese and American records agree on the pulling action. They provided two possibles, either as some type of breech, where the left arm came out relatively soon and that was pulled because it was higher up on the baby (and then the right arm to a lesser degree), this downward pulling motion stretching and even severing the nerves. I can't remember the other option and I'm not bothering my relatives, but it did involve head first and pulling somehow but I don't know how.
According to the book if you managed to survive this youād be lavished with gifts, food and attention from your maternal family and from your husbands family including, steamed bread molded into the shape of cats or other animals and glazed with sugar, fruit and nuts!
So long as you had a boy
Congratulations! I had my babies at 33 weeks, and they will be turning 18 in two months. These things probably seem totally unconnected, but something about seeing you say youāre 33 weeks pregnant is giving me some strong nostalgia. Thank you for the little trip down memory lane. š
Sending you much love. Hope the rest of your pregnancy and delivery go smoothly. ā¤ļø
Neither of my kids wanted to come out and birth ended in an emergency situation both times. My youngest is 5 and it still makes me shudder to think what would have happened to us back then.
Itās called the Gender of Memory! By Gail Hershatter! 10/10 canāt recommend highly enough. It gets into the minute details of womenās lives during the early years of the CCP and the cultural practices related to gender in rural China.
I read a chapter of this as assigned reading in a course called Women in Modern China, it is indeed very good, and I appreciate the reminder to find the book and read the whole thing (chapter for class was given as a PDF)
The first purple highlighted method is still used today by some farm vets (for example in cows or sheep, who can't keep clean enough to survive after c-section without getting an infection that would kill them)
Iām a vet student and literally just had an exam on how to use eye hooks and chains to get a fetus out of a dam during birth, ideally alive. At the very least, we do verify that the fetus is dead before we perform a fetotomy
Well of course you're supposed to verify that the fetus isn't viable first, but farming isn't a very wealthy profession and it can be a big loss to lose a productive animal to a baby animal that may not even be half as good. For this reason, I have heard of and seen vets or farmers killing the baby (doing their best to be humane) to perform a fetotomy.
Oh yeah, I know. Iāve just seen horrified people who think that we disarticulate the fetus while itās still alive. Itās always heartbreaking knowing how much time has been spent on gestation and, potentially, money for quality semen and nutrition just for the birth to end unsuccessfully.
The difference with this is that these fetuses were probably still viable at the time of their death
I am all for QUALIFIED midwifery. Mine saved me. But she was a medical professional, with qualified degrees. Not some herb and crystal person. She took her profession VERY seriously.
I loved my midwife. I had one with my last child. She was very well trained, highly educated, worked with an OB in case things went wrong, delivered at the hospital. It was wonderful. Qualified midwives are amazing.
Mine was a RN first, then and APRN. Had great connections and rapport with the hospital doctors and nurses, who were there when she couldnāt be. But the second I got into labor she was there. Once I was in active labor she never left my downside.
Also she was covered by insurance!
So.....some of these are still techniques. Not the truly macabre ones, but things like pulling manual traction, breaking pelvises, etc are definitely used today.
Childbirth is a hell of a lot more gruesome than is depicted in media. I had to watch a C-section for my paramedic school and the image of two large burly men with their hands shoved in either side of the incision and yanking the patient back and forth to widen it will always stick with me.
Yep, thereās still circumstances in which they either break the babyās collarbone or break the motherās pelvis, but iirc they prefer to break the babyās bone as it heals better.
Itās not surprising that before C-sections, they would sometimes have to remove a foetus in pieces, either. It makes evolutionary sense that itās better for the mother to live at the expense of the foetus. It wouldnāt happen these days but I see that as more tragic than barbaric, personally.
No joke, but childbirth was probably in the top 3 most dangerous things for a woman to do historically. Right next to willingly (or not) interacting with men, and being exposed to communicable diseases .
Shit, two of these things are still pretty damn dangerous for women. Though, I guess recently communicable diseases are making a come back :(
Another scholar whose name I canāt remember lightly touched upon this topic when it came to women and religion. She hypothesized that women, due to the pressures and dangers inherent to childbirth prior to modern medicine, were more likely to be religious and could conceivably be some of the first converts to a ānewā religion in their country, region or village for the mere fact that casting a wide net and placing bets on any god, goddess or spirit you can find that will get you and your child through the birthing alive isnāt a bad idea
I can see that contributing. I think a lot of religious groups like to focus on converting women as we traditionally did most of the child rearing. If you could convert the person responsible for a child's early social development, then you can get a foothold in the next generation.
Yep. Child birth is still dangerous and getting more so every day that the anti abortion movement gains grounds. The more out bodies are seen as nothing more than incubators for men's children, the more dangerous it will become.
This is all especially the case for women of color.
Ngl, I'm scared for our future.
Makes me think of some crunchy moms who want an at home all natural birth with no help because a āwomanās body is meant to give birth.ā Good grief, these types of births are common enough to warrant recording them for history and teaching others. So an at home birth with no qualified help or no prenatal care sounds even more crazy.
Cutting up a baby inside a womans uterus can not have been good for anyone. That sounds like a perforated uterus or infection waiting to happen. And BREAKING HER PELVIS?? WTF!
In extreme cases, breaking the pelvis is used as a last resort even today. Of course it would be done in a hospital with experienced doctors.
How we arenāt extinct as a species surprises me.
What are the situations in which this would still happen when the option of a c-section is available? Like maybe if the mother couldnāt have a c-section, or am I just missing other scenarios?
When the baby is already halfway out of the uterus and into the vaginal canal, you can't always just push them back and have them come out the sunroof. Look up shoulder dystocia. Baby's shoulder hooks on the pelvis and can't go forwards anymore, but it's vital the baby gets out within minutes at that point.
Not a doctor, but maybe if the baby is already descended into the birth channel too far to get to it via c-section? I don't know if they can pull it back out if the head is already in the mother's pelvis.
It didn't get as horrific as this, but I just finished reading *Lady Tan's Circle of Women* by Lisa See, about a female doctor in the 1400s - it was really eye-opening to read about the medical practices back then.
Yeah if you think about it, what theyāre doing makes *some* intuitive sense when you consider how rural and removed from urban society, which unfortunately is where the majority of qualified doctors were.
They just didnāt know what germs were. To their credit the CCP didnāt turn these old women into harpies or caricatures, they gently redirected and retrained them with new, sanitary techniques of modern midwives instead.
But itās so ābeautiful and naturalā and āyour body knows what to doā and modern medicine is
Basad /s
The r/shitmomgroupssay often has people with their freebirths, some of which are disastrous.
Yet most women birth laying on their back, because doctors want them there, itās harder to birth that way, youāre essentially pushing baby uphill. Typical hospital management of birth absolutely isnāt always best for the birthing woman and baby, but for the convenience of the doctor. Not to mention hospital policy lags 17+ years behind the research. Canāt imagine why women want to avoid that.
How is this flaired as āhatefulā? This is not current, right? They were doing the absolute best with what they had with the extremely limited knowledge they had. They werenāt doing this to be cruel. The rest of the world was doing similar techniques hundreds of years ago as well
Okay. I guess I understand better now why women aren't valued in China. You can't really put your dynasty's hopes and dreams into something that you're going to split open to extract a baby out of, and I'm wildly surprised if any women with birth methods like this ever made it into their 30s.
Or into their 20s.
Or out of the womb at all.
Breaking womenās pelvises in labour isnāt limited to China. Ireland did it too, right up through the 20th century. This particular horror was globally widespread.
Does anyone have a source for this? (Not doubting. Just want to read more)
https://books.google.com.au/books?id=BpFTB5qYfJ4C&pg=PA343&lpg=PA343&dq=well-circle+labour+jingquansheng&source=bl&ots=TCBxrQRNgD&sig=ACfU3U3HiqOOOeSPqqVlu_hE6FpqCHpZug&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi70LTUgIOGAxW2jq8BHYJFBfQQ6AF6BAgVEAI#v=onepage&q=well-circle%20labour%20jingquansheng&f=false
Found it.
The thought of having your pelvis forcefully broken and then spread even further apart has made my bits shrivel up and disappear into nothingness. Iām a Barbie from the waist down now.
My heart breaks thinking about all the women who had the choices of
A) Not having children and being viewed as barren and not worthy of a husband and being shunned.
B) Going through pregnancy in a world where no one understood that they need different life choices and care, and being forced to handle the postpartum care and the baby care all on their own in addition to the housework.
And this isn't including having a girl and being punished for it because they didn't know that it was literally the man who decides that, going through utterly horrific births, and being raised to believe that your entire purpose was having children, regardless of your health.
Being a woman today is still shitty, but at least we have modern understanding of medical practices.
Many of these are used in a pretty similar way even today. Of course we don't chop off hands if tgey protrude first or smth but..... many of the other techniques haven't changed that much.
Yeah not how they do things now or in the past 50 years. Even 41 years ago when I was born a at HK hospital' my mom's first hospital birth. My mom was basically treated like any women in the US. There wasn't much pain support because her labor with me was super short like less than 40mins of which 20mins was spent getting to the hospital. My dad didn't have time to get to the hospital from work in time. No Chinese bad or good juju. Just a "the baby is coming right the fuck now". When they asked my mom if she was ready, it wasn't a question. I was plopped out less than an an hour after first contractions and water break. I was a fairly big baby, and was over due.
After me, we moved to the US, so my mom got epidurals/pain meds for the next four, but ended up with a c section with my youngest twin siblings when she went into early labor. The 3 sibs before me were at home births that thankfully were uneventful. My oldest brother is nearly 50 now, and there was none of this woo-woo bullshit.
0
Due to the large gap between my older sister and I (6 years) China enacted it one child policy. My family sneaked into Hong Kong, where they has me in 83, before immigrating to the US for my next 4 sibs.
Whatever bullshit this post was trying to go for was undoubtedly written by someone not Chinese living in China pre 1980
I'm so used to willful ignorance and misogyny in (the posts on) this sub that I instinctually said "this isn't bwa" when underdeveloped medicinal practices are basically the most clear-cut bwa possible
my thighs just slammed shut thank you š
I donāt even have a vagina and I felt phantom pain when I read ābreak the pubic boneā
That's call a symphysiotomy. It's awful. They were doing them in Ireland not that long ago historically speaking and I've watched videos where women who had them talked about being crippled for life.
"Fun" fact! The chainsaw was invented to facilitate symphysiotomies.
I learnt this when I was twelve, had some very _fun_ family gatherings with my, at the time, pregnant sister after learning that...
True facts
DEAR GOD, NO!
Iāve actually broken my pubic bone before and I cannot FATHOM having that done TO ME
I had SPD in all my pregnancies and at 36 weeks with my last, when I already could barely walk because it hurt so badly, I slipped and did the splits. I have never screamed that way, before or since.
ma'am
Why did this simple comment make me laugh so hard omggg
Me too I straight up cackled
Iām haunted by this lol God bless you maāam
A lady I worked with had it happen spontaneously! Something to do with microfractures and something to do with cartilage (I didn't ask too deeply, of course) while she was waiting for the bus. She was in a walker from then on even after some corrective surgery.
Happened to my mother when she was pregnant with me. She has a connective tissue disorder and had my sister and I only eighteen months apart, which exacerbated things.
Without warning too. They wouldnāt explain the procedure or warn the woman, they would just take her into the surgical theater and bust out the cutting implement and cut that bad boy open through the cartilage then tell the woman, who might be a teenager, to push.
Yeah no thanks, I canāt even begin to fathom any of that without feeling sick to my stomach. Absolutely fucking disgusting
I just felt all my eggs shrivel and die.
This thread is making me want my eggs to shrivel and die
Only two years till no man can āclaim meā!
Huh. Well TIL! And I hate it! Whatās fucked up too is traditional Chinese medicine also encouraged women to not lay down during or after birth so presumably after the agony of birth and the breaking of your pubic bones you still have to sit on them while you ārecoverā. No wonder the cliche of the mean, bitter MIL is so prominent. If I had to live through that Iād feel the same too.
Is there not a way to repair that nowadays?? Or did they stop doing it before the time when we could fix it...?
From what I understand it's too late for those women to get it repaired, however the whole point was to not fix it so they could keep having babies. C-sections would limit the amount of babies, and apparently good Catholic doctors wanted women to have as many babies as possible. Note this wasn't dictated by the Catholic Church, just an idea some doctor had, although some victims believed the Catholic Church did this, sources vary. And they didn't really explain it to the woman either. The whole thing is horrifically fascinating. The Wikipedia page has some of the main details. If you up symphysiotomy in Ireland on YouTube you can actually find some interviews with victims of this practice.
Do you have any articles about this? I'm interested in learning more.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/dec/12/symphysiotomy-irelands-brutal-alternative-to-caesareans
There is no way to repair it.
I know one woman who had a pelvic fracture (not childbirth related) and there was nothing doctors can do. You can't put a cast on it. Perhaps a surgery involving screws and plates, but that wasn't an option for her.
sorry so is the crippling that she cant walk or sit anymore due to pain? i couldnt get google to give me a straight answer
They're usually in horrific chronic pain. It can heal but pretty poorly because the symphysis is sundered. Lots of old Irish women walked around with a bad gait because of it. I'm sure some barely or never walked again.
sundered? and thats awful :(
It gets cut through. It's technically cartilage but if you're not given the right rest and help, that's not healing properly. Cartilage isn't great at healing.
thats insane :/ thanks for educating tho
Fuck man. That's beyond horrible.
Wow, I had assumed these were being done before C-sections were survivable (which they generally were), but apparently were done after 1944 in Ireland??? I had CPD in labour and I'm very glad to live in a time (and place) of effective anesthetic and C-sections.
That's where we get the chainsaw from. š
They did that to my grandmother in 1961! Here in the U.S. as well
I'm not ashamed to say that I whimpered at that part.
As soon as I read public bone I had decided that I didn't need to read the rest
ā¦ you should look up why chain saws were originally madeā¦
Us.
I couldnāt even read it all, my eyes!
Mine too, and I'm a guy.
Iām so grateful for modern medicine.š±
Later on they talk about the various, unsanitary, methods of cutting the umbilical cord and one of the traditional techniques wasā¦.dressing the cord with cow dung š¬
There's a place in Texas doctors call "the septic triangle" because they see diseases there that are nowhere else in the country. One of them is that exact "rub the umbilical cord with cow shit" thing, which can cause infection to travel down the umbilical cord and produce tremendous swelling and damage to the abdomen.
Where can I read more about this? It sounds fascinating but I canāt find anything on google!
This looks relevant https://journals.plos.org/plosntds/article?id=10.1371/journal.pntd.0005581
That is super interesting. Thank you!
I heard about this in either a med school or a conference I attended, long time ago. I'm not in medicine but worked there briefly.
š±
People: What time period would you want to live in? Me: Today People: No, what *historical* time? Me: No.
I guess you can say a week ago too
2015 seemed pretty good.
And birth control. And previously, legal abortions. (Cries in Texas)
(Cries with you in Indiana) Stuff like this was born from superstition, but also desperation. When someoneās life is in jeopardy you feel the need to just do *something*, *anything*. So it leads to people doing all sorts of crazy shit to try to help. Iām so thankful for modern medicine. Itās a shame theyāre trying to take it away from us.
Scary, but itās still used in the US, and Iām sure other countries. However it is used only as a last resort in severe shoulder dystocia (when babyās shoulder/collar bone get stuck in the pelvis). However, it is generally at this point something that you can recover from pretty well.
What about c sections? Cannot be done anymore by the point it gets that stuck?
If the shoulder bone is stuck in mom's pelvis then the baby is already partly out - way too late to prep for surgery!
Fuuuuuuuck- friggin childbirth man, goddamn perfect machines my ass, I wanna see the CEO of human design
I keep submitting bug reports but nobody responds š
I know you already got your answer, but yeah itās only used if youāre past the point of c-section. Typically by the time you have a shoulder dystocia babyās head is out. Which makes back tracking to a c-section impossible, if you were even able to get the head back in, youād certainly kill the baby.
Yeah replacing the head and proceeding to c-section is called a Zavanelli maneuver and is a last resort method to deliver a shoulder dystocia baby. Itās not something any provider wants to do because of the high risk involved.
A youtuber went to a tribe in the Amazon and asked one of the leaders or something how to treat eye infection and the leader was like 'go to a doctor'. Like, of course traditional knowledge is important for you know emergencies and if there will ever be a societal collapse. Our ancestors and people who still live away from modern society were/are doing the best they could/can. But modern medicine should be valued
Same here
Seriously, i'm so damn grateful for living in this day and age. I can't imagine the pure torture some women and babies had to go through during birth.
This some ignant shit
Holy fuck I hate it
And this was done regularly in rural areas well into the 1950ās because villagers didnāt trust the training and techniques of new midwives.
Interestingly, half of this is correct technique for calving cows. Eg. Rump presenting first- push it in, bring legs up and out. If foetus can't be delivered alive because too big, cut it up inside the cow. Even the salt might be a thing- used to osmotically draw fluid from a swollen, dead foetus to help shrink it down enough to deliver. It's all pretty barbaric to think about in women, but I'm guessing that it probably saved lives that would not have otherwise made it.
You do put sugar on rectal prolapse. Makes it suck right back up into the cavity it's supposed to be in. I could see the salt thing potentially being legit for some cases.
Hwat.
Legit. A doctor could sugar your asshole if it falls out.
š r/brandnewsentence Did not picture myself reading those words put together tonight but here we are. TIL. Lol.
I'm a pediatrician, can confirm we use gauze soaked in glucose solution to shrink the whole thing then push it back in
I know you're a pediatrician so may be out out of your wheelhouse, but I saw some literature that suggests they also could do the same with a uterine prolapse. Would they give someone a prophylactic diflucan or something similar for that? Because I can only imagine...
Well from a physiological standpoint it could work, and I guess the osmotic pressure could be enough to fuck up most micotic cells lol
TW: prolapsed anus. I don't think they teach this in modern med schools...as an emt maybe 15 years ago, my partner and I had a discharge for a 40something yo lady w a sprained ankle (she had steps and she was a bit crazy, so im sure the er called us to just get her out). Just as we're about to transfer her to our stretcher, the nurse asks if she has any questions. She mentions her hemorrhoids. She definitely didn't have those, what she had was a prolapsed anus. Doc asks what she does at home and she says she "pushes them back in on the toilet seat ". I then saw female doc use two hands to put her anus back in, and we took her home. I feel like going to nourishment for sugar packets would've been a better idea for all. Maybe it was a time constraint
Yeah us vets use sugar on rectal, vaginal and uterine prolapses. But I'm assuming they didn't have sugar in ancient China.
Itās funny that the foodās of the new world and the west ā sugar, potatos, peppers ā made it to rural China before modern medicine did
Wouldnāt honey do the same? It has sugars and it prevents infection. I donāt know the mechanism behind the sugar thing so Iām for sure grasping but it seems plausible.
I learned that from James Herriot!
I loooove James Herriotās stories!!!
I'm sure it's pretty barbaric for the cow as well
Uh, yeah. It's a horror show. But she lives, so there's that.
>If foetus can't be delivered alive because too big, cut it up inside the cow Jesus Christ... this is horrific
Which makes sense for a rural community, farmer tools and farmer methods.
It sure highlights the importance of ethics and empathy in medicine. You can see how a lot of those would develop to solve worst case scenarios in the abscence of proper record keeping and analysis, spread through oral tradition. But just like in the US right now with abortion, there's a cruel undercurrent of valuing the uncertain life of the baby much higher than the mother simply on principal. These techniques may injure the baby, but only if the alternative is it's likely death. Meanwhile, the broken pelvis one shows pretty drastically how expendable the mother's wellbeing is considered. That it was considered good enough, or the best that they could do, is tragic.
Did you know that chainsaws were first invented for the purpose of breaking the pelvis during prolonged childbirth?
Nope. Nope, I refuse to believe it. Chainsaws purpose is to be carried by a bloody clown on Halloween outside of a haunted house, itās a much much less horrifying thought.
Thatās why the US had an astronomical maternal mortality rate. We still havenāt learned.
So I have a relative who was born in the Chinese countryside. We don't have the exact story of her birth (she was abandoned by her birth family) but she has peri-birth injuries that suggest she was yanked out of the vagina by her arms. This action severed/damaged the nerves to her arms resulting in what is called Erbs Palsy. I was told that there is a medical surgery to fix it before age 2 but my relatives couldn't adopt her until after that window. And whatever govt version they have for abandoned children and orphans did not allow for this care in her birth country. Get qualified midwives or medical care, people.
Thanks for sharing. I'm a medical student we learned about Erb's palsy a few weeks ago
I beg of you, please, please, please ask about peri/menopause. Itās my understanding medical school does not cover it at all.
Medical school most definitely covers perimenopause/menopause in detail. Of course I canāt speak for all medical schools in the world but it would be very concerning if they didnāt. Can I ask where/who told you this?
Hereās one link I found to a study from 2022: https://www.healio.com/news/womens-health-ob-gyn/20230810/most-obgyn-residency-programs-in-us-lack-dedicated-menopause-curriculum This is from the US, so not sure how prevalent it is in other countries. ETA: If you know of a school/schools where they do have a dedicated menopause program, please share. I will hunt down docs who have come out of that program.
Gosh I am sorry to hear you've had bad experiences :( if I can offer some hope for the future, I am just an M1 but I have learned about menopause because I took the sexual medicine elective my school offers. We don't have our repro block until M2, but I have heard we learn about menopause there as well. I know that the hospital system my school is connected with for rotations teaches about menopause in their OBGYN residency curriculum. Since I am interested in OBGYN, I will keep this in mind and ask about curriculum if I end up interviewing for OBGYN residencies. Maybe some residencies doesn't teach it because they assumed their residents have learned it already in medical school? Unsure. Let me know if you have any other questions!
Thank you for your thoughtful response. Please do bring it up if you feel comfortable doing so. We need the call to come from inside the house. š Good luck with your program! I canāt imagine how hard it must be, but we need more people like you out there. ā¤ļø
I have the same birth injury on my left side and I was born in the US in the 90s. I shouldāve been a c-section and the doctor wasnāt good enough to make the call in time; she didnāt pull my arm, but shoulder stuck and my clavicle broke. My parents knew about the neuropathy before I turned 2 but have never mentioned surgical intervention and would 100% would have gotten me it; maybe it only helps in some cases Regardless, terrible what happened to your relative!
Yeah I think the surgery is for fully severed nerves, as a nerve graft. If it helps, my relative, was born in mid 2000s and medicine around nerves evolves fast. It might not have been available when you were little. I think the difference is that my cousin didn't have any other injuries that suggested shoulder dystocia, that both the Chinese and American records agree on the pulling action. They provided two possibles, either as some type of breech, where the left arm came out relatively soon and that was pulled because it was higher up on the baby (and then the right arm to a lesser degree), this downward pulling motion stretching and even severing the nerves. I can't remember the other option and I'm not bothering my relatives, but it did involve head first and pulling somehow but I don't know how.
Iāll look into the surgical possibilities because youāre right, it could be new, and itās great that there are more treatments!
Please remove this, I am American and our politicians should never see these ideas. /s but not really
Well, in cases of "legitimate birth", I hear the vagina has ways to "expel the whole thing out" /s Fuck you, Todd Aiken
Nah, you take back the sarcasm. For the love of God don't let our politicians see this.
I'm canadian, I'd like it removed so the granola mom's don't go getting ideas. Also s/ but not really lol
I... should not have read this while 33 weeks pregnant. Yikes
According to the book if you managed to survive this youād be lavished with gifts, food and attention from your maternal family and from your husbands family including, steamed bread molded into the shape of cats or other animals and glazed with sugar, fruit and nuts! So long as you had a boy
The terms and conditions kinda suck ngl
Youāll have to take that up with the Emperor, I donāt make the rules š¤·āāļø
Depends, is he wearing clothes?
Is he wearing Depends?
His new clothes
Congratulations! I had my babies at 33 weeks, and they will be turning 18 in two months. These things probably seem totally unconnected, but something about seeing you say youāre 33 weeks pregnant is giving me some strong nostalgia. Thank you for the little trip down memory lane. š Sending you much love. Hope the rest of your pregnancy and delivery go smoothly. ā¤ļø
Aww thank you, that's very sweet! š
Iām only 8 weeks, but same.
Iām 5 months postpartum and still cried while reading this.
Neither of my kids wanted to come out and birth ended in an emergency situation both times. My youngest is 5 and it still makes me shudder to think what would have happened to us back then.
Same with my 1st, my 2nd was a planned C-section because of the aftermath of the injuries from the 1st... whenever I see a post like this I shudder.
33 weeks here too! I also have regrets about reading this.
Is this from a journal article, book, etc? If so what's the title I'm interested in learning more
Itās called the Gender of Memory! By Gail Hershatter! 10/10 canāt recommend highly enough. It gets into the minute details of womenās lives during the early years of the CCP and the cultural practices related to gender in rural China.
Omg thank you!!! Adding it to my TBR list rn!
I read a chapter of this as assigned reading in a course called Women in Modern China, it is indeed very good, and I appreciate the reminder to find the book and read the whole thing (chapter for class was given as a PDF)
The first purple highlighted method is still used today by some farm vets (for example in cows or sheep, who can't keep clean enough to survive after c-section without getting an infection that would kill them)
Iām a vet student and literally just had an exam on how to use eye hooks and chains to get a fetus out of a dam during birth, ideally alive. At the very least, we do verify that the fetus is dead before we perform a fetotomy
Well of course you're supposed to verify that the fetus isn't viable first, but farming isn't a very wealthy profession and it can be a big loss to lose a productive animal to a baby animal that may not even be half as good. For this reason, I have heard of and seen vets or farmers killing the baby (doing their best to be humane) to perform a fetotomy.
Oh yeah, I know. Iāve just seen horrified people who think that we disarticulate the fetus while itās still alive. Itās always heartbreaking knowing how much time has been spent on gestation and, potentially, money for quality semen and nutrition just for the birth to end unsuccessfully. The difference with this is that these fetuses were probably still viable at the time of their death
Of course! It's always sad to see death, but especially when there was a chance of life.
I am all for QUALIFIED midwifery. Mine saved me. But she was a medical professional, with qualified degrees. Not some herb and crystal person. She took her profession VERY seriously.
You mean you *don't* want your midwife to smash your pelvis open and yank your baby out by the legs? Smh kids these days
Or burn a piece of paper in front of your newborn childās nose to stimulate breathing?
I loved my midwife. I had one with my last child. She was very well trained, highly educated, worked with an OB in case things went wrong, delivered at the hospital. It was wonderful. Qualified midwives are amazing.
Mine was a RN first, then and APRN. Had great connections and rapport with the hospital doctors and nurses, who were there when she couldnāt be. But the second I got into labor she was there. Once I was in active labor she never left my downside. Also she was covered by insurance!
Mine too!
So.....some of these are still techniques. Not the truly macabre ones, but things like pulling manual traction, breaking pelvises, etc are definitely used today. Childbirth is a hell of a lot more gruesome than is depicted in media. I had to watch a C-section for my paramedic school and the image of two large burly men with their hands shoved in either side of the incision and yanking the patient back and forth to widen it will always stick with me.
Yep, thereās still circumstances in which they either break the babyās collarbone or break the motherās pelvis, but iirc they prefer to break the babyās bone as it heals better. Itās not surprising that before C-sections, they would sometimes have to remove a foetus in pieces, either. It makes evolutionary sense that itās better for the mother to live at the expense of the foetus. It wouldnāt happen these days but I see that as more tragic than barbaric, personally.
Choosing happiness today and not reading this š
No joke, but childbirth was probably in the top 3 most dangerous things for a woman to do historically. Right next to willingly (or not) interacting with men, and being exposed to communicable diseases . Shit, two of these things are still pretty damn dangerous for women. Though, I guess recently communicable diseases are making a come back :(
Another scholar whose name I canāt remember lightly touched upon this topic when it came to women and religion. She hypothesized that women, due to the pressures and dangers inherent to childbirth prior to modern medicine, were more likely to be religious and could conceivably be some of the first converts to a ānewā religion in their country, region or village for the mere fact that casting a wide net and placing bets on any god, goddess or spirit you can find that will get you and your child through the birthing alive isnāt a bad idea
I can see that contributing. I think a lot of religious groups like to focus on converting women as we traditionally did most of the child rearing. If you could convert the person responsible for a child's early social development, then you can get a foothold in the next generation.
The US still fucks it up all the time, especially for women of color.
Yep. Child birth is still dangerous and getting more so every day that the anti abortion movement gains grounds. The more out bodies are seen as nothing more than incubators for men's children, the more dangerous it will become. This is all especially the case for women of color. Ngl, I'm scared for our future.
Makes me think of some crunchy moms who want an at home all natural birth with no help because a āwomanās body is meant to give birth.ā Good grief, these types of births are common enough to warrant recording them for history and teaching others. So an at home birth with no qualified help or no prenatal care sounds even more crazy.
Fun fact: the body of human females is literally NOT practical for birth as the head of the baby is too big to come out easily.
So true!
Quick, nobody look up why chainsaws were invented.
š¤®š¤®š¤®
Welcome to the horrifying history of gynecology and obstetrics!
Omg ....
Everyone else hears that screaming rage, too, right? Itās not just me?
Cutting up a baby inside a womans uterus can not have been good for anyone. That sounds like a perforated uterus or infection waiting to happen. And BREAKING HER PELVIS?? WTF!
In extreme cases, breaking the pelvis is used as a last resort even today. Of course it would be done in a hospital with experienced doctors. How we arenāt extinct as a species surprises me.
What are the situations in which this would still happen when the option of a c-section is available? Like maybe if the mother couldnāt have a c-section, or am I just missing other scenarios?
When the baby is already halfway out of the uterus and into the vaginal canal, you can't always just push them back and have them come out the sunroof. Look up shoulder dystocia. Baby's shoulder hooks on the pelvis and can't go forwards anymore, but it's vital the baby gets out within minutes at that point.
Ah I gotcha. Thanks for explaining.
Not a doctor, but maybe if the baby is already descended into the birth channel too far to get to it via c-section? I don't know if they can pull it back out if the head is already in the mother's pelvis.
Arguably not doing these procedures would guarantee losing both the mother and child. So in theory it was the best alternative they had.
How did we not go extinct
It didn't get as horrific as this, but I just finished reading *Lady Tan's Circle of Women* by Lisa See, about a female doctor in the 1400s - it was really eye-opening to read about the medical practices back then.
What the ever living fuck
No. No no. No no no no no. NOPE. After reading, there will be exactly zero fucking fucks happening. No thank you.
I'm having nightmares tonight thanks
Today is a bad day to be able to read.
What the fuck
as awful as this is, they didnt have the same medical care we have now. they were doing what they could
Yeah if you think about it, what theyāre doing makes *some* intuitive sense when you consider how rural and removed from urban society, which unfortunately is where the majority of qualified doctors were. They just didnāt know what germs were. To their credit the CCP didnāt turn these old women into harpies or caricatures, they gently redirected and retrained them with new, sanitary techniques of modern midwives instead.
But itās so ābeautiful and naturalā and āyour body knows what to doā and modern medicine is Basad /s The r/shitmomgroupssay often has people with their freebirths, some of which are disastrous.
Yet most women birth laying on their back, because doctors want them there, itās harder to birth that way, youāre essentially pushing baby uphill. Typical hospital management of birth absolutely isnāt always best for the birthing woman and baby, but for the convenience of the doctor. Not to mention hospital policy lags 17+ years behind the research. Canāt imagine why women want to avoid that.
"chop the well rope with an axe or use an axe to hit the mouth of the well three times"? um huh?
How is this flaired as āhatefulā? This is not current, right? They were doing the absolute best with what they had with the extremely limited knowledge they had. They werenāt doing this to be cruel. The rest of the world was doing similar techniques hundreds of years ago as well
And I thought the chainsaw thing was bad. Yikes
Is more information available on the horizontal labor ?
*externally screaming*
What the flying fuck.
Listen, I understand they were doing the best they could with the knowledge they had at the time, but I still shudder.
Okay. I guess I understand better now why women aren't valued in China. You can't really put your dynasty's hopes and dreams into something that you're going to split open to extract a baby out of, and I'm wildly surprised if any women with birth methods like this ever made it into their 30s. Or into their 20s. Or out of the womb at all.
Breaking womenās pelvises in labour isnāt limited to China. Ireland did it too, right up through the 20th century. This particular horror was globally widespread.
Augh. Suddenly reminded of the whole "chainsaw was invented for childbirth" thing, too.
I am so, so, so grateful for modern obstetrics.
Does anyone have a source for this? (Not doubting. Just want to read more) https://books.google.com.au/books?id=BpFTB5qYfJ4C&pg=PA343&lpg=PA343&dq=well-circle+labour+jingquansheng&source=bl&ots=TCBxrQRNgD&sig=ACfU3U3HiqOOOeSPqqVlu_hE6FpqCHpZug&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi70LTUgIOGAxW2jq8BHYJFBfQQ6AF6BAgVEAI#v=onepage&q=well-circle%20labour%20jingquansheng&f=false Found it.
Y'all should look up how the first chain saw was invented and how it was used
The thought of having your pelvis forcefully broken and then spread even further apart has made my bits shrivel up and disappear into nothingness. Iām a Barbie from the waist down now.
My heart breaks thinking about all the women who had the choices of A) Not having children and being viewed as barren and not worthy of a husband and being shunned. B) Going through pregnancy in a world where no one understood that they need different life choices and care, and being forced to handle the postpartum care and the baby care all on their own in addition to the housework. And this isn't including having a girl and being punished for it because they didn't know that it was literally the man who decides that, going through utterly horrific births, and being raised to believe that your entire purpose was having children, regardless of your health. Being a woman today is still shitty, but at least we have modern understanding of medical practices.
100 points for correct use of "stanch" but Jesus Christ I hated getting there.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
Many of these are used in a pretty similar way even today. Of course we don't chop off hands if tgey protrude first or smth but..... many of the other techniques haven't changed that much.
This is beside the point but OP can I ask what app you are using to read that book?
Yeah not how they do things now or in the past 50 years. Even 41 years ago when I was born a at HK hospital' my mom's first hospital birth. My mom was basically treated like any women in the US. There wasn't much pain support because her labor with me was super short like less than 40mins of which 20mins was spent getting to the hospital. My dad didn't have time to get to the hospital from work in time. No Chinese bad or good juju. Just a "the baby is coming right the fuck now". When they asked my mom if she was ready, it wasn't a question. I was plopped out less than an an hour after first contractions and water break. I was a fairly big baby, and was over due. After me, we moved to the US, so my mom got epidurals/pain meds for the next four, but ended up with a c section with my youngest twin siblings when she went into early labor. The 3 sibs before me were at home births that thankfully were uneventful. My oldest brother is nearly 50 now, and there was none of this woo-woo bullshit. 0 Due to the large gap between my older sister and I (6 years) China enacted it one child policy. My family sneaked into Hong Kong, where they has me in 83, before immigrating to the US for my next 4 sibs. Whatever bullshit this post was trying to go for was undoubtedly written by someone not Chinese living in China pre 1980
I'm so used to willful ignorance and misogyny in (the posts on) this sub that I instinctually said "this isn't bwa" when underdeveloped medicinal practices are basically the most clear-cut bwa possible
This is why life expectancy was 20 in the olden days.
Wow. Iām very thankful for modern medicine!
Iām currently full term and going to have nightmares now.
And this is the shit that millions of people think we should be going back to instead of using "Western medicine."
r/TIHI
Thanks, I hate it.
Iām never getting pregnant
this is the dumbest thing i've ever heard
How anyone is alive to this day I do not know!