There is no reason why a woman with a proper size pelvis and a proper size baby should not have that baby fairly normally, if you dont mess the case up, and by messing it up I mean doing a lot of these things that a great many obstetricians think are proper to do, and which we are under pressure to do, because of the propaganda spread by the drug houses-barbiturates, opiates, paraldehyde and all the other things to keep the woman from having pain in labor. Think the Lord, the pendulum is beginning to swing the other way, and the best men of the “old school” have finally learned that it gives them awfully bad babies. Perhaps from now on we wont have as much trouble keeping our patients away from those things.
DR. SCHWARTZ : Twilight sleep !.
DR. CUSTIS : Luminal, morphine, codeine, paraldehyde, scorporalamine,all that list of things which has become popular.I have turned more than one patient down because they came to me saying they wanted that kind of labor. I say, “If you want that kind of labor, go somewhere else. I cant do it ; I dont know enough”.
But we must remember in obstetrics there are cases where the placenta is in front of the baby, where you have a real placenta praevia. Your patient is in real danger. The safest thing to do in that case is something different than to give the homoeopathic remedies. Except for mechanical things-and that is a mechanical thing because of a malposition of the afterbirth-we are pretty poor if we dont keep away from a lot of the complications of both pregnancy and labor.
DR. SCHWARTZ : Speaking of mechanical obstructions, I recall when I was over at Womens and Childrens Hospital for four months, a woman coming in to be delivered. She was about forty- five years of age, the wife of a coachman for a wealthy family who wanted a doctor who is considered a very good surgeon and a fine obstetrician. She did not see the patient until shortly before she was in labor. This was the fifth pregnancy.
As intern there, I was in the operating room. The patient had quite a bit of bleeding. The baby was delivered all right but the woman was losing considerable blood. Her pulse was very rapid. The doctor thought she had controlled the haemorrhage. By the time the woman got back to bed and the doctor had just got black to her home, I called her up again because I noticed the oozing and the bleeding. We all thought the uterus was fully contracted. By the time the doctor got back to the hospital and made an examination, she found what she had thought was the contracted uterus was an enormous fibroid, where the uterus should be, making pressure on the uterus. That is where the bleeding came from.
Of course when the condition was recognized the haemorrhage was controlled with secondary treatment, but there was this fibroid blocking the passage, the size of a babys head and hard as bone.
Education: Cincinnati College of Medicine & Surgery
Author, Distinctive Phases Of Kali Carb. and Homeopathy , the medical stabilizer