Birth Journeys: Birth Stories and Birth Education for Moms & Pregnant Individuals
Are you looking for a podcast to help you feel confident in your birth experience?
Then The Birth Journeys Podcast® is for you! We share powerful and transformative birth stories that illuminate the realities of childbirth. Hosted by a labor nurse and prenatal coach who specializes in transformational coaching techniques, this podcast goes beyond traditional birth narratives to foster healing, build trust, and create transparency between birthing individuals and healthcare providers.
In each episode, we dive into essential topics like birth preparation, debunking common misconceptions, understanding hospital procedures, and promoting autonomy in the birthing process. We also bring you the wisdom and insights of experienced birth workers and medical professionals.
This is a safe and inclusive space where every birth story is valued, honored, and deserves to be heard. Join us in exploring the diverse and unique experiences of birth givers, and discover how transformational coaching can empower your own birth journey.
Contact Kelly Hof at: birthjourneysRN@gmail.com
Birth Journeys: Birth Stories and Birth Education for Moms & Pregnant Individuals
Balancing Knowledge and Intuition: Birth Insights with Dr. Elliot Berlin of Informed Pregnancy Media
Dr. Elliot Berlin transforms how we view childbirth, challenging the check-box mentality that leaves many parents feeling they've failed when birth veers from their rigid plans. Through our conversation, he introduces a revolutionary alternative: approaching birth planning as a flow chart with multiple potential pathways rather than a single desired route.
The discussion delves into the delicate balance between modern medical systems and our innate bodily wisdom. As Dr. Berlin explains, "You're not driving a precision automobile, you're in a hot air balloon" – a perfect metaphor for the need to surrender some control while maintaining agency during birth. His insights on choosing birth environments are particularly illuminating: "If you're buying a hospital ticket, you're going on a hospital ride," highlighting how critical it is to select providers and settings aligned with your birth philosophy.
Perhaps most eye-opening is the exploration of how cultural disconnection from natural birth has left us with only dramatized media portrayals as reference points. This cultural void creates unnecessary fear and unrealistic expectations. Dr. Berlin compares it to forming impressions about air travel solely from disaster movies – we'd be terrified to fly if our only exposure came from Hollywood!
The conversation also explores the disappearing art of vaginal breech delivery and how chiropractic care creates optimal conditions for babies to assume head-down positions naturally. Dr. Berlin's holistic approach addresses not just physical alignment but the emotional journey through pregnancy and birth.
Whether you're planning your first birth or processing a previous experience, this episode offers profound wisdom to help you navigate choices with confidence and flexibility. Follow Dr. Berlin's new podcast "One Way or a Mother" for deep-dive birth stories told across multiple episodes, and explore resources at informedpregnancy.com.
Check out Dr. Berlin on instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doctorberlin/
Join the Bump & Beyond Online Community for moms & moms-to-be!
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Kelly Hof: Labor Nurse + Birth Coach
Basically, I'm your birth bestie! With me as your coach, you will tell fear to take a hike!
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Medical Disclaimer:
This podcast is intended as a safe space for women to share their birth experiences. It is not intended to provide medical advice. Each woman’s medical course of action is individual and may not appropriately transfer to another similar situation. Please speak to your medical provider before making any medical decisions. Additionally, it is important to keep in mind that evidence based practice evolves as our knowledge of science improves. To the best of my ability I will attempt to present the most current ACOG and AWHONN recommendations at the time the podcast is recorded, but that may not necessarily reflect the best practices at the time the podcast is heard. Additionally, guests sharing their stories have the right to autonomy in their medical decisions, and may share their choice to go against current practice recommendations. I intend to hold space for people to share their decisions. I will attempt to share the current recommendations so that my audience is informed, but it is up to each individual to choose what is best for them.
Hello, today I have with me Dr Elliot Berlin. Dr Berlin is a prenatal-focused chiropractor, childbirth educator and wellness advocate based in Los Angeles. As the founder of Informed Pregnancy Media, he is dedicated to empowering expectant families with evidence-based information and engaging content. Dr Berlin hosts the widely popular Informed Pregnancy Podcast, where he explores candid conversations with experts, birth professionals and parents about pregnancy, birth and postpartum experiences. His work extends to Informed Pregnancy Plus, a streaming platform featuring pregnancy, birth and parenting-related documentaries, platform featuring pregnancy, birth and parenting-related documentaries, mind-body programs and educational workshops. Now he is launching One Way or a Mother, a groundbreaking podcast that delves into complex birth stories from multiple angles, unfolding over an arc of 10 episodes per season. Through his chiropractic practice, media platforms and educational initiatives, dr Berlin combines clinical expertise with a passion for storytelling, helping families make informed choices through their journey to parenthood. Dr Berlin, welcome and thank you so much for joining me.
Speaker 2:Oh my goodness, Kelly, thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 1:I'm really excited to hear about your new initiative. This sounds fascinating to me the One Way, or a Mother podcast, where we're following moms through pregnancy, which we just were chatting a bit before I hit record and I was saying, yes, I do often take the full two hours talking to moms about their pregnancy and birth stories because, really honestly, it would take 10 episodes to really fully encapsulate what happens when one becomes a mother right or for the second time or the third time or whatever. It's all so unique and so involved in such a huge learning and growth experience. However, the topic of choice today is informed choice in childbirth, which goes together because one way or another talks about mom's journeys and the choices that they have to make.
Speaker 2:So I can't wait to hear about this over the years with executives at TV networks and trying to get birth content on more mainstream media, or what used to be mainstream media.
Speaker 2:What is that? Even there's been a turn and it's interesting. I generally am sitting around the table with a bunch of people who either don't have kids or totally don't get it. They're always looking to how can we infuse drama in these birth stories and I'm like are you nuts? The most natural drama and drama doesn't always mean bad. Like beautiful things happen. You don't have to like everyone is like a snowflake with its own built in you know, act one, act two, climax and conclusion, and they just didn't get it.
Speaker 2:So we decided to do our own media instead. But our podcast one way or a mother Mother that is launching now really stems from the Informed Pregnancy podcast, where we have all sorts of different types of episodes, but the most popular are the birth stories.
Speaker 2:And especially, we do these before and after birth stories. So I'll interview somebody before they have their baby about pregnancy and also about their plans for birth. What are their intentions, how do they picture it going and how they plan to get there. And then, after they have the baby, and how did it actually go down? And once in a while it goes down just as they envisioned it, and oftentimes it goes down quite differently, sometimes much better than they expected and cooler than they could ever imagine, and sometimes the opposite. Either way, the feedback that we've gotten is exactly what you were saying, kelly, which is that I'll have a 40-hour birth story told in 40 minutes and that gives you one minute per hour to recap what happened there. And some of the birth stories are really intricate and interesting and people want more. The feedback was take us deeper into these stories, bring us in, give us more details, don't leave us with just a cursory cliff notes version of the birth. And so we decided to try something different and it's kind of modeled after the serial podcast, where they told one story and they really went deep, interviewing everybody and telling the story from more of a 360 view and giving a fuller picture.
Speaker 2:And so in our first season we interview a mom, ariana, who I think has unfortunately a fairly common story, which is that she was planning for a home birth and ended up with a cesarean that she hadn't planned for at all, definitely didn't want and isn't sure she needed, and it rocked her in a lot of different ways.
Speaker 2:Certainly physically it rocked her. Some people have a great cesarean experience. She did not and I think emotionally and spiritually it rocked her because she had such a different vision and plan and lifestyle. And we catch up with her in her second pregnancy and she's trying to process everything that happened last time and plan for a better experience this time. And so we interview her and we interview her husband, zach, and we interview her doctor and her midwife and her doula and her Reiki healer and her mom. She's processing ancestral things and it's really quite interesting and fascinating this sort of metamorphosis that she goes through leading up to her second birth, which no spoiler alerts here, but it's a serialized birth story told over an arc of 10 episodes. I was going to call it baby serial, since we modeled it after the serial podcast, but I don't want to get sued so we called it One Way or a Mother.
Speaker 1:I love it. Like I said, two hours for a birth story is still not enough, but it feels like a lot, and I have interviewed a couple people before and after, which I think is fascinating as well. So I love that you're diving so far into it and that you're interviewing the other family members. It's just there's so much that plays into it, which is really kind of part of my passion as well, because, as a labor nurse, I noticed moms coming in with, like you said, these expectations and thoughts of how things are going to go down and without the ability to really process the pivot Right, because the culture that we have right now is this download your birth plan, check off the list and hand it over as if it were an order that you're putting in right, but we have to react to the situation and we have a baby that is also making choices.
Speaker 1:So then, how do you make those informed choices within the context of what is happening in your birth? You would make an informed choice driving down the road without traffic. You would make the informed choice driving down the road without traffic. You would make the informed choice of the speed you're going, the direction you're going to go, which path you're going to take to your destination, but if you have a bunch of traffic and there's an accident on the way, and now, suddenly, the exit you're planning on taking is blocked, you're going to have to make a different choice, and that happens in birth as well. And so then being able to roll with it is the challenge, because everybody has a vision for what they want with their birth experience, and there's a lot of people focused on what they don't want from their birth experience, and that means they don't want this particular intervention. But what if that's the only exit that you can take to get to your destination? So then, how do we manage with all that?
Speaker 2:You said so many incredible things in that just one little segment. First of all, I think it's really interesting to hear from the RN's perspective, the labor and delivery nurse's perspective, because especially like an open-minded, very supportive RN who still is shackled in certain ways in terms of what you're able to do I want to speak to that for a second. And then also the birth plan or the birth intentions. They sort of go together. So the hospital right down the block from me that I can see out my window here delivers 9,000 babies a month.
Speaker 2:A year, sorry, a year, oh I was going to say dang Still a lot of amniotic fluid Still a lot but it's 9,000 babies a year.
Speaker 2:So 9,000 babies a year, so it's a lot of babies every day, and over the past few years they've really tried hard, I think, to become more open-minded, to be more accommodating and receptive to different birth plans and the different ways women want to give birth at their hospital, the birth community, including doulas and childbirth educators, and they invited us for these gatherings to interface with the hospital and try to have a teamwork approach. One of the speakers was a doula who was the liaison for the hospital and she said something that I think is very important to understand. She said just know that if you are buying a hospital ticket, you are going on a hospital ride, and that's important because part of your choices in childbirth are you have choices on where you want to give birth. You can give birth at a hospital, and there's several different hospitals to choose from. You could do birthing center, depending where you live.
Speaker 2:Right, you could do birthing center, and sometimes there are many birthing centers to choose from. You could do birthing center, depending where you live. Right, you could do birthing center, and sometimes there are many birthing centers to choose from. You could do it at home. You could do it in the back of a U-Haul if you want to. But if you do it in a hospital, you're going to someone else's facility who has a certain way of doing things, comfort zone on how they do things and legal protections on certain ways that they do things. And if you're making that choice, you sort of have to work within the confines of that choice that you made, and so I think it's really important.
Speaker 2:Your most important birth choice is probably picking an environment where you want to give birth and the providers, who you want to surround you, if any, and be realistic about what comes with that and the choices that you make within that system, within the ticket that you bought.
Speaker 2:Then you have a range of choices that you can make in there and this hospital is trying really hard to support you within that range. But it's somewhat unfair, I think, to go in and say we're going to do this my way even though this causes more liability for you, or this is something you're not trained on and not comfortable with. I see it from both sides and I think that's one of the more important choices you can make is being realistic about where you choose to do things and who you choose to support you. In terms of the birth plan, I really like your analogy on and downloading a birth plan and just checking off all the things I don't want is probably not going to empower you very much when you get there. Just all the years of do the work that I've done doesn't tend to suit you well. I look at the birth plan like it's a flow chart.
Speaker 2:And just like you were saying, if I was going to drive from Los Angeles to San Francisco. There's a million different ways I can get from point A to point B and if I just leave it to my GPS it'll take me on a certain path. But if I explore the maps I might make choices. I might say I'd like to take the most scenic route, even if it's a little bit longer, or maybe I just want to take the fastest route, even if it's boring. I always like to try to pass by a Krispy Kreme donut shop, but that's just me and with the birth plan. So if I look at the map, just like you were saying, I want to take the most scenic route, but all of a sudden the highway's closed, the freeway's closed.
Speaker 2:There's other ways for me to get from point A to point B and they're not necessarily bad, they just weren't my first choice. And especially when it comes to something like childbirth, where there's health involved health of the mom, health of the baby and other factors, sometimes those roadblocks come up and it's smart to not crash through the roadblock but to find a detour that will also get you to point B. And what I like for the birth plan is to pre-think those things. If X happens, what will I want to do and make that your intention. So page one is the ideal path you want to take.
Speaker 2:If all things being equal, I would love to take this route from Los Angeles to San Francisco, and that's probably the most natural birth option. You could envision yourself wanting to experiment and to experience, um, and so for some people that'll be just a. I want to have a cesarean birth.
Speaker 2:And that's your page one, and your last page also, because unless you get pumped yeah, yeah, or that sometimes happens too like I want to have it, but you know, if I go into labor and baby's coming too quick or there's no room available, then I'll have this vaginal birth Exactly no-transcript placenta previa or something like that and you're off of page one without having even started.
Speaker 2:Or sometimes labor starts beautifully and something comes up and you need to move to page two or three, and the last page is always going to be that cesarean birth, because if you need it then you want it, even though it's not your primary choice, and because I think all of those interventions, all the medical interventions, all the drugs, all the procedures, all the surgeries, I think are a gift to us of wonders of modern medicine that we could in two minutes, get your baby out safely, surgically and sew everything back up. I think that they're incredibly helpful when they're used on the sparing side, but when we overuse them, I think they very quickly become more harmful than helpful, when they're pushed on people who don't want them and don't need them, and so, because there's a lot of that going on for various reasons, there's a big push back against them, they're vilified, they're looked at as evil and everything is. I don't want this, I don't want that, don't make me do this. And there again you have to pick providers, if you have the luxury to do so. Pick providers who you trust and who are in line with your goals and desires and wishes and supportive of them, and then, if that provider is recommending we need to do a cesarean birth right now. You're not questioning them. Are you just pushing this on me because you're part of that big evil medical establishment? That's a dangerous thing to do, to not have that trust, and so I think these things are very tied together.
Speaker 2:Number one the environment, where you choose, and the providers you choose and the facilities that you choose are going to come with certain guidelines and abilities.
Speaker 2:You're going on a particular ride and try to work within those options that are actually available to you instead of fighting the system the whole way.
Speaker 2:Part two is make a birth plan where you pick your primary goals but ultimately, once the journey starts, you're not driving a precision German automobile, you're in a hot air balloon and the wind could gust one way or the other and again you could change your altitude and you'll still get to the destination spot.
Speaker 2:But to be flexible and to think things out ahead of time and if you do, if you have providers you trust and who are in line with your goals and you're not going to question when it's go time to make decisions, and with that in mind, I think that if you wanted to have, let's say, an unmedicated birth at the hospital and you ended up having induction because X, y or Z happened and you needed it, and the induction maybe progressed to a certain point, but then the baby wasn't responding well and you ended up having a cesarean birth. All of that was part of your birth plan and therefore you don't come out feeling like I failed. If your birth plan is only page one, then you very oftentimes feel like I didn't have the birth I wanted and I failed.
Speaker 2:But I think, if you think it through and really plan for all the different pathways this birth could take, and make choices ahead of time, when it's not in the heat of the moment. Even at the end, even if it didn't go exactly how you wanted to, you still were within your birth plan and I think that's an empowering thing.
Speaker 1:I think so too, and that's why I'm not a big fan of the downloading the birth plan and checking things off, because that, I think, is a lot of what the culture right now feels like is actually informed, and it doesn't feel informed to me. So I feel like I'm doing a lot of last minute, trying to inform patients about their choices or helping them reconcile their situation and grieve the birth that they wanted, when I feel like what you said if we could get the flow chart of your birth ironed out ahead of time, then we wouldn't be grieving during the birthing process, we would have already processed all of that and then we can just focus on having the best day of your life. However, it looks right, because the day that you get your baby in your arms, no matter how that looks, that's supposed to be the happiest day of your life, and if it's marred with all of this negativity and grief and processing huge emotions especially when you've already got all these huge emotions coming anyway and all these hormones that are like surging, it's just really it's a big challenge. So, yeah, I think it's so important to have informed choice and I mean informed.
Speaker 1:You know, like you've really thought through all the scenarios, which is challenging because sometimes those are scary to look at and we don't have to go down every single pathway, but you have to be able to know if the doctor whom I trust, like you said, recommends this, the right questions to ask to make sure that aligns with my values. Even though I trust this doctor, I want to feel comfortable with this situation and the choices that I have. Asking the right questions and making sure that your voice is heard is equally important. I mean our healthcare system. It's hard to advocate for yourself anyway, like whether it's birth, whether it's the emergency room, whether you've been diagnosed with cancer, it's hard to advocate for yourself, but I don't know why. I just feel like it's harder in obstetrics.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you're absolutely right, and I don't know why either. But what I could tell you is I just recently had two different recently, meaning one just a month or two ago and one about a year ago. Recently, meaning one just a month or two ago and one about a year ago two different physicians who had babies, who had a hard time advocating for themselves, and for one of them it led to her having to terminate her pregnancy because she had hyperemesis and the system she was in just was not listening to her, taking care of her, giving her what she needed to support her, and it was really profound. As I was talking to her, I'm like you are a medical doctor in the medical system unable to advocate for yourself. And she was on board. That's absolutely true. The system didn't really make her feel like she had space to advocate for herself. I'm like, if you can't, how do the rest of us advocate for ourselves? I was just a plain person who doesn't have all the medical background and knowledge and walk in there with credentials. How do we advocate? How do they advocate for themselves? And it's a profound point that you make.
Speaker 2:It's not. I think it's set up that way in the medical model in general, but even in obstetrics. If you look at the lab coat that the doctor wears very dignified and prestigious and the flimsy little oversized unisex hospital muumuu that is very susceptible to the wind blowing this way or that way and being totally exposed, who is the dominant one and who's observing it there? It's set up to make us believe. So. I do believe. If you buy a hospital ticket, you're going on a hospital ride, but at the same token I have rights, and in America there's freedoms that give me certain rights. And the feeling that is given, I think, when you walk into a hospital in general, is that I check my rights at the door and I now work for you, so to speak. But in reality it's the opposite. You, a, don't have to check your rights at the door and, B, everyone at that hospital works for me. I'm the patient, I'm the customer. From a medical perspective, a law perspective and even a business perspective, it's the other way around, but the environment doesn't make it feel that way. That's tricky to navigate.
Speaker 2:I also would point out one other thing, which is that, as much as we've learned scientifically and medically and advanced over the past 100 years, 200 years which we have, incredibly we still know a tiny fraction of what there is to know. We are born innately knowing all of it and today medicine can't tell you how to take a sperm and an egg and incubate a baby into a human, but a woman's body can do that and her body also is similarly programmed to deliver the finished product in a very efficient way For various reasons. There's this kind of dual, double-edged sword where information is great and information is terrible at the same time. The more information I have in that neocortex, that new part of my brain that other animals don't have, that can think and process and rationalize and worry, the less I'm reliant on the limbic system, the older, animalistic part of my brain that has all of the hardwired information, much more data than we know medically today with all the advancements. For example, if I was listening to the nutritionist inside me, I would probably be a whole lot healthier than I am. It would tell me exactly what I need to eat, when I need to eat, when I've had enough, too much, and I would love to listen to that nutritionist inside me. But just on the way to work from my home to the office, which is only a 15-minute drive, I pass no fewer than five giant billboards that have things like a huge stack of fluffy pancakes with butter and syrup dripping down the side. That totally drown out that nutritional voice inside me that's saying go have some whole wheat grain or something like that. I think it's true with everything. The more we could listen to that voice inside, the better things would go for us.
Speaker 2:There's a lot of noise around, it is one thing, and so we're not so in touch with that inner voice. We don't trust it and we don't have a great relationship with it. So when it comes time to labor, which is so unknown, it's hard to trust that voice instead of all the voices around you. And part B is because we are in a modern medical system and that intelligence is not familiar with that system and can't really help you make choices within that system, and so it's a double-edged sword. We need to have information because that information doesn't exist. We need to have information because most of us are not in touch with that inner voice. But I think one of the best things we could do to help people have empowered experiences is help them connect to that inner voice and help them understand the options that exist in the modern medical system. And I guess one other thing is this is more of a modern thing as well.
Speaker 2:It was not that long ago that we grew up in villages and lived on family properties and saw regularly and participated in regularly family members having babies, pregnancy, childbirth Everyone would pitch in. Breastfeeding was not so foreign, you would just see it, it would be part of your upbringing, it wasn't foreign. I think most people don't live with their families on the family property anymore and so we don't have that kind of support that we used to have. We don't give it, we don't receive it. And then also we don't have that kind of exposure to what natural, normal, healthy pregnancy, birth and postpartum look like.
Speaker 2:And so the vision we do have oftentimes come from people who have their stories, and the ones who love to tell their stories are usually the most dramatic and maybe even over-dramatize what actually happened.
Speaker 2:And the other source is television movies and newspaper headlines. And let's say, for example, I'm 30 years old, I've never flown on an airplane and I'm going to go for my first flight, but all I know about airplanes is what I see in TV movies and newspaper headlines. I'd be terrified to fly. You'd probably have to knock me out like Mr T from the A-Team, because the only images I have of air travel are like mechanical failure and the plane falls out of the sky or it's hijacked by terrorists or there are snakes on it. The idea that a plane can just take off and have a smooth flight with yummy snacks and land safely is foreign to me, and I think that's what we do with childbirth, and people just have this wildly dramatized view of childbirth as something horrible and terrible that you just have to survive through, whereas I think it as a nurse and someone who is involved in in childbirth, you see the whole range of what childbirth could be, and sometimes it looks like the most incredible thing where people are sad when it's over.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Sometimes it's super calm. I was interviewing a doula the other day. She talks about boring birth, which is like kind of the goal right. And because of boring birth, like you can focus on the exciting part, which is meeting your baby right. The other parts don't have to be eventful. And I think it's funny because I wasn't a labor and delivery nurse. When I had my first, I was with my second.
Speaker 1:The expectation for me was like a dramatic, like the way that you behave to cope with the pain is to act like the movie Knocked Up or Friends, where everybody's like screaming, and I never knew that there was other ways to cope with the pain that didn't involve this screaming like a banshee, which I just think is so interesting. And now that's one of the first things that I try to share with moms when they're going through this process is that there's just other ways to cope. We don't have to act the way that we see society acting. That's not what we did when we were living in the villages or in the family farm, when there was actual support and there was actual demonstrations of what the body normally does. The other day I had a mom that was natural doing great screaming, hurting my ears and I was like friend, let's talk about this, let's hack your nervous system a little bit, because do you know why gorillas beat their chest?
Speaker 1:Do you know why gorillas beat their chest? That's because it stimulates the vagus nerve to calm your body, to go into the parasympathetic nervous system so that you can actually like flow with what's going on. I was like all you have to do to hack your nervous system is take that high pitched scream, bring it down into your chest and let it vibrate through your chest with a low roar, like you're just powerful. And she started growling and doing that. Oh my God, that is so much better.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's a huge, huge difference between adrenaline noise and oxytocin noise.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it's just. It's sad that we don't have actual models for that now.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, so one of the things that we've done at Informed Pregnancy because of this exactly and the media is so tainting is I made two documentaries. I produced two films. One is called Trial of Labor, which is about VBAC. The subtitle would be how to have your second birth experience the first time around.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And learning from other people's stories. And the other one is called Heads Up, the Disappearing Art of Vaginal Breach Delivery, and there's some really beautiful births. Heads Up has a beautiful breech birth, to see them. When people see it, they're like, oh, why did we stop doing that?
Speaker 2:Right you know it's a beautiful option and we go into the whole story. You know it's a beautiful option and we go into the whole story, the whole study that sparked the disappearing option for Bridge Birth. But when my two films came out, they did really well at first in terms of the mission, which is empowerment and informing people of choices and options, and then over time the screenings died down and people wanted to talk about it and interview it and I asked other filmmakers, like Ricky Lake from the Business of being Born, like how do you keep your film alive and still fulfilling its mission after that initial flare of the match dies down? I talked to several filmmakers and they all had the same answer, which is it's hard, people don't find it anymore and people stop talking about it and it's not on their radar. And then I was getting from trial of labor. This is what really hurt People saying gosh, I wish I had seen that before I had my baby and I'm like no, I made platform for video.
Speaker 2:There's about 30 documentaries on there and it does give you insights into birth the way it could be Movies like Orgasmic Birth, these Are my Hours, which is just a great film of a person giving birth in an undisturbed setting, narrating what she was feeling like when she went through it. And there's other films, like Beautiful Births, that are less known films. The Mama Sherpas is a great one about doulas Midwife, the film and, yeah, we have about 30 documentaries on there, and so I wanted to aggregate it in a way that anybody can watch it from any place. We have apps for Apple, android, roku. You can just stream it online, and it's $6 a month with no commitment, and so you really and if you have trouble with the $6, I would encourage you to email me and I'll make it available to you anyway. We're not in it to make money, we're in it to make a difference.
Speaker 1:That's amazing. I really think having all of that out there is so important, because I think that people just have no clue what they're getting into and they don't know that they have no clue what they're getting into. It's so hard. I feel the same challenge that you feel with having the birth that you want with your second birth versus what you wanted with because I had to have a do it. We call it the do over at the hospital that I work at, and it's actually why I started working at the hospital that I work at, because the nurse that interviewed me there asked me why I was wanting to be a labor and delivery nurse and I was like because I'm processing my first birth. And she was like, oh sweetie, we'll have your do-over here, you don't worry, I'll be your nurse. And she was. She was the nurse for my do-over and she is so cute. She still says about my son.
Speaker 2:I'm the one that saw him first. You don't know, I'm thinking of a show for Informed Pregnancy Plus called the Do-Over.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, you should Absolutely, and I mean it's a thing it really is. It's sad because that's how I processed my first birth was having my do-over, and it doesn't have to be like that. And that's like I said why I got coaching certification so that I could try to reach out to moms beforehand, because it's great to have a doula and an advocate and a chiropractor and all those things. But what happens if you don't know? You need those things, Right.
Speaker 2:That's what you said before is also a great point. You don't know what you don't know. So at least if you know what you don't know, then you can try to figure out that information. But if you don't even know that you don't know it, then you're just stuck not knowing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that could be a whole other journey, when you end up not knowing what you don't know and then you have to come out and deal with it, which I do get a lot of second time moms that are like hey, so how do we fix this first birth and then we go through that whole scenario.
Speaker 2:You know and heads up, there's a mom who tells her story and she had a breech baby and she labored so fast she went to the hospital the butt was pretty much coming out and the doctors just had never seen a breech birth before and they panicked and in their panic they first of all kicked out her husband and second of all knocked her out completely, completely and op report says they pushed the baby back in essentially and did a c-section and she has no memory of her birth at all because they knocked her out. She was probably two minutes away from just holding her baby. Naturally her husband has no memory because he was kicked out and it really again, it traumatized her in a lot of different ways and and then she does talk about, like when she had her V-back, her C-section scar when she saw it in the mirror for her always appeared to her like a frowning face and then when she had her V-back it turned the frown around for her.
Speaker 1:That's beautiful.
Speaker 2:That do-over concept was very powerful for her.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I really hope we get to a place where we theoretically it's easier for the baby to come out headfirst right. That's why you spend a lot of your practice trying to get babies to go to the optimal position.
Speaker 1:However, I have one doctor that I've worked with that is trained to do breech delivery. I've never actually witnessed a breech delivery, but there were bree breach deliveries during her time at the hospital that I work at. But, honestly, we really need to get to a place where providers are comfortable handling that situation, because I have friends that have had similar situations where their baby had to be pushed back up in them and the uterine trauma and vaginal trauma and all of the trauma that happens, like the emotional trauma of being in that situation where your baby has to be shoved back inside of you in order to have a major surgery. It's horrific, and are we really saving lives when we're doing that? Is that really what we're doing or are we just doing what's convenient for the doctor?
Speaker 2:What's interesting is I think it was a legitimate question the study, the term breach trial, dr Mary Hanna at McGill University in Canada as cesarean birth has become and continues to become safer and safer. So at the beginning it was not safe. Oftentimes you can only save the mother or the baby and then, even if you could save both of them, you lose the uterus. It's just become very predictable, very safe. As that happened, the question starts to pop up who's going to be better off having this cesarean birth option versus a vaginal birth? So let's say placenta previa. Pretty much everyone agrees that if your baby's sitting on top of the placenta has to smash through it to come out vaginally, you're going to be better off having a cesarean birth right.
Speaker 2:But then more and more things would come up and you'd pose the question in STD and active lesion or other things. And then eventually the question in the late 90s was what about breech babies? Because we know that when you deliver breech babies vaginally it's not necessarily harder, it's just there's two complications that can come up. That don't happen with head-down babies born vaginally, that don't happen with head down babies born vaginally and don't happen with C-section, which is either the whole baby comes out and the head gets stuck head entrapment or the cord comes out first and then the baby comes and compresses the cord. So if you have a head down or a butt down, it blocks the cord from coming through. But let's say there's just a foot down or nothing down, then the cord can come through first and the baby can come compress its own cord and that could be a really serious emergency. So because of those two things we said what about? What about breech babies? And the term breech trial essentially took 2000 women who had breech babies and said we're going to try to deliver you vaginally and you by cesarean and see what happens. And even the finding of that one study was there was a small but statistically significant better outcome for breech babies born by cesarean versus vaginal birth. Two years later, the same crew did a follow-up study on the two-year-olds from that original study and found no long-term difference in health. And two years after that, a researcher his name is Glazerman tore apart the original study, pointing out all the flaws in the study that, if you account for them, may have very well concluded that there's a small but statistically significant better outcome for breech babies born vaginally versus by cesarean, especially if you include selection, which really wasn't done in the original studies.
Speaker 2:Is the baby in a good position for vaginal breech delivery? A safe position which all the doctors that I know who deliver breech babies. They have several criteria. They don't just deliver anybody who has a breech baby. They'd look for selection. Who's going to be a good candidate for this?
Speaker 2:Without that, by the time, four years went by and the recommendation had been for all babies to be born by planned cesarean. Nobody had been trained on breech birth for four years. That whole new crop of doctors had never seen one. And it's different. You need the skill, you need the confidence, you need the experience to be able to do it. And even though ACOG changed their guidelines, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists changed their guidelines to okay.
Speaker 2:Maybe a vaginal bridge delivery is a reasonable option if you can find a provider who's still confident and comfortable doing them, and there aren't, they're just whoever had the experience either stopped for four years and doesn't want to go back there or is going to retire and stop practicing in the very near future. Very few younger doctors who are intellectually curious and want to learn are coming up through the pike, and so it truly is a disappearing art. And it's sad because you have somebody that's who has two vertex babies, two babies born head down, seven pounds each, uncomplicated births, and now this third one the placenta, let's say, is in the way, and they're in a frank reach position safest, easiest one to deliver vaginally. Nobody wants to do it, and so she's forced on her third baby to have a cesarean birth, even though one can reasonably say that if you took a hundred women in the same position and delivered them half by cesarean and half by vaginal, the vaginal outcomes would be much better.
Speaker 2:That choice is just gone for most people, and I think that's sad. There's one or two doctors here in Los Angeles who are younger and who are training and who are just finding that, getting their feet wet, and sometimes even then the hospitals just won't allow it. It's not the community norm, so they're worried about liability. So it really is a disappearing art. California made it doubly hard because we had a bunch of midwives who were comfortable and passed on the tradition of breech birth from generation to generation. But California took breech delivery out of the scope of practice for midwives. So you have doctors who can do it but won't, and midwives who want to do it but can't, and so the option just disappears.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think it's tragic because major surgery is still major surgery and it has the same ramifications and long-term effects as any major surgery.
Speaker 1:We don't want to just do a major surgery for the heck of it, and so when we just do it because people aren't trained or because of liability or because laws changed unfairly, it's enraging that we are losing choices right and left because of laws and all the other stupid things that are going on. So I had one way that I wanted to go with this, because I know you have techniques to get breech babies into an optimal position that most providers are comfortable with delivering. But you did bring up a point and my wish would be that home birth, midwives and birth centers and hospitals could work together as some sort of system or in my brain the word that's coming up is triage, because that's just kind of medically how I understand things. But if we're having a safe physiological experience with birth, we could handle the home birth situation. But if that goes not quite as expected, to have these different tiers in place where we actually all work together collaboratively, and that's the missing piece. So I'm not sure.
Speaker 1:I guess it's choose your own adventure now. Would you prefer to talk about it?
Speaker 2:Let's try to nail them both, Okay let's do it.
Speaker 2:First of all, I think that's how it works in Canada and in European countries. There are several medical systems in which you're assigned a midwife and you can do a birthing center birth or a home birth and that is for low-risk, healthy pregnancies. And if something comes up during the pregnancy or during the birth, then that's where physicians take over. And I remember there was a doctor who once said having a surgeon deliver a low-risk, healthy baby like having a neuropsychiatrist babysit your child. It's overkill and the tools of the trade for these doctors are drugs and surgery.
Speaker 2:So when you take a low-risk, somebody who doesn't need drugs and surgery and you pair them with the wrong provider, it's just a mismatch. Them with the wrong provider, it's just a mismatch, Whereas the midwives are just a different model, meant to just encourage and coach and guide your own strength and your own wisdom and your own knowledge and your own process. So I agree with you, that would be a great system and I think that system exists in other countries but not here. When chiropractic became a thing in America, the American Medical Association really felt their feathers being ruffled and there was a lot of animosity between the two establishments and they did not work together at Arguably, there still is.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there probably still is. I'm in Los Angeles in this little messy bubble where we have cool holistic MDs and very open-minded chiropractors, and we do work together. A lot of my referrals come from medical doctors. A lot of my patients are medical doctors.
Speaker 1:That's exciting.
Speaker 2:And the collaboration. When we're like working sort of east meets west, working together, yin and yang, our patients get the best results, the best outcomes and the best experiences. There was a doctor here who had that exact model. He worked with midwives and he really couldn't understand for the life of him why somebody in a low-risk, healthy pregnancy would want to come see him. These midwives talk to these moms for an hour I don't even know what to say for five minutes to these moms. They need that kind of support, they don't need me, and that was their relationship.
Speaker 2:If something were to come up, then he would sometimes just go to the home birth. If they needed, let's say, a more intricate repair or other procedures that they couldn't do but he could do, he would sometimes go to the home birth so it could stay at home and if not, then they would meet him at the hospital. I think that's a great potential model, but right now I think it's still like that medical model, midwifery model, really looking at each other as adversaries and not as teammates. Hopefully that's changing a bit. I think here again in Los Angeles more and more people are choosing out of hospital birth, making hospitals like the one down the block there, scratch your heads and reach out, because, at the end of the day, it's a business, and when I start to lose business, that sparks change, and so I think, they are trying to say, oh no, you can have that kind of more natural birth in our facility too.
Speaker 2:But really, when we come to trust each other and all find our place and not look at it like we're competing for clients, then I think we'll have the best experiences and outcomes. I think you're 100% right about that. I don't know how we get there, but I think the more people choose to like I was saying at the beginning, if you're going to buy a hospital ticket and go on a hospital ride and you don't like that, so you go outside the hospital and do a birth center ticket for a birth center ride, the more that happens, the more the hospital will say maybe we need a birth center and things can change in the hospital. And I think that is possible because a lot of people want the medical safety net in a hospital, without everything else that comes with being in a hospital.
Speaker 1:Exactly yeah, so I think that's how we get there A less hospitally hospital.
Speaker 2:Yes, in terms of returning breech babies, it's very simple. Look, the statistics are like this In the first pregnancy, at 28 weeks into the pregnancy, approximately 50% of babies are not head down. And then, just four weeks later, at 32 weeks, only 10% of babies are not head down. So there's this massive migration between 28 and 32 weeks when babies just start moving head down, which coincides also with when they start to run out of room in the womb. So at 28 weeks it's not like half are up and half are down and they're not budging. They're constantly in flux. They're moving around. Once they run out of space, they have to pick a position and, generally speaking, head down is the most comfortable fit for a typically shaped baby and a typically shaped uterus. So at 32 weeks, you have about 10% that are breached, and at birth, 37 weeks and beyond, it's more like 3% to 4%. And so 3% to 4%, by the way, is not a tiny number, it's a variation, and I look at it as a variation of a normal birth position, not like a complication, but because you run out of options to deliver. Then it becomes a much more pressing issue if you're looking to have a vaginal birth.
Speaker 2:When babies don't go head down. There's usually a reason for it. It could be something structural. The placenta could be in the way, the placenta could be high and the cord could be short. The cord could be long and wrapped around the baby. From all that movement in the original trimester, two trimesters the uterus can have a variant shape that's not really conducive to head down. There could be fibroids that are getting in the way. Amniotic fluid, I think, makes a big difference. When you're on the it's a huge range of normal and when you're on the lower side the babies can truly be stuck, not have enough fluid space to move around in. When you're on the higher side there's sometimes so much space that they don't have any incentive to stay head down. And those are all things I can't have any impact on really. But there's a functional component as well, which is the low back.
Speaker 2:Hips and pelvis are supposed to be super loose, relaxed and open at the end of pregnancy and your body tries to do that hormonally with hormones like relaxin and elevated progesterone. But sometimes they're not loose, relaxed and open and that could happen because the muscles and tendons and fascia, all the soft tissue, are stiff and tight and rigid from different types of stress physical stress, emotional stress, mechanical stress or the bones, where the pelvis is not just a big bone, it's a bunch of smaller bones connected by ligaments and cartilage, and so it has the ability to expand and contract in different directions and accommodate the movements the baby's trying to make, or even facilitate the baby's movements. But if there's a lot of restriction in the soft tissue and or in those joints where they come together there's no movement, then number one the incentive may very well be not to move head down when they run out of space but to move head up under the ribcage where there's more room than that super restricted pelvis. And number two even if the baby's trying to move, if the pelvic area doesn't have its dynamic mobility that it's supposed to have, it's just a static structure that can't accommodate. This is going to naturally resist the baby's efforts to move.
Speaker 2:That's an area where I can shine. Everything I do is like WD-40 for the musculoskeletal system in general, the spine and pelvis in particular. We use medium to deep tissue massage to loosen up the muscles of the low back, hips, pelvis, and then, once that's nice and loose, you see how the bones are moving. If the bones move great, we leave them alone and, if not, we do some adjustments. I'm not trying to move the baby. I'm trying to create an environment by releasing muscles and bones that are restricted, an environment that's inviting for the baby to want to come down, an open space and an environment that's going to be able to accommodate that movement if the baby tries.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I think a lot of people don't understand what chiropractors do to help facilitate movement of the baby, and that was a really great explanation of how that happens. I try to educate my clients about keeping everything mobile and I've got I carry my pelvis around and show them how it actually is moving.
Speaker 2:I guess I've seen pictures of you, video of you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love my pelvis. It's like my favorite thing ever, especially if I have a partner. Like if the birth giver's partner is a engineer, then I'm like man. We got to talk because let me show you my pelvis.
Speaker 1:But yeah, I think that's amazing because what we see in the hospital and what you'll be offered in a hospital is like literally turning the baby, which isn't always effective, especially if you haven't been doing the work. If you've been sitting for your entire pregnancy, like most people have, and you've got all that tightness in your joints and there's just not the space, then your baby's not going to be able to move. So I don't think I didn't personally understand the pelvis was a mobile structure. I also didn't understand how our muscles and fascia and all that stuff and even scar tissue if you've had other surgeries or injuries or any of that how could that could play into your baby's position and just not leading to mobility? So thank you for explaining that. Sure, well, I know you have to go see patients, but remind us where we can get in contact with you and where we are going to be able to listen to your podcast and see your Informed Pregnancy Plus and this new podcast that's coming out.
Speaker 2:Okay, everything on the media side can be accessed at informedpregnancycom. To get directly to the streaming you Informed Pregnancy Plus, you can go to informedpregnancytv and it has apps on Apple, android, roku. You just search for Informed Pregnancy and can stream on your big screen. Can stream anywhere you want to Our podcasts the Informed Pregnancy podcast and the brand new one, one Way or Mother on all the major podcast players Spotify, apple and the 20 other ones were everywhere you listened to podcasts and I gave you a little teaser about season one. We're already in production on season two and season three.
Speaker 2:And the stories get even bigger and crazier. Don't want to miss out? Go to your podcast player and click follow for One Way or Another.
Speaker 1:I'm super excited about it. I know how crazy pregnancies are.
Speaker 2:Yes, I think even you will see things, because you guys have seen everything twice, but I think you'll see things. Stories on, especially season two and season three. Season three quadruplets Stop. That terrifies me years and uh, it's a crazy story from how she got pregnant with quadruplets. It's not what you think and it's the decision making that had to happen throughout the pregnancy. It's a very just. Curiosity alone will keep you gripped to this story. Anyway, right now we're in season one, which is a great story that ariana is the we follow around. She has incredible energy and personality and by sharing so, she really is going to help a lot of people avoid the do-over, I think, and have their second birth experience the first time around. One thing I forgot to say is social media. I don't do a lot of it, but what we do is on Instagram at Dr Berlin spelled out D-O-C-T-O-R-B-E-R-L-I-N.
Speaker 1:How do people in the LA area find you if they want to be your patient?
Speaker 2:Oh, we have a website for the practice, which is drberlincom D-O-C-T-O-R-B-E-R-L-I-Ncom. I do pregnancy and postpartum chiropractic. I do energy healing, which after ideally before birth. It's the most incredible thing to do energy healing with the baby inside you, because there's two energies that we're working with.
Speaker 2:I love that and when we can sync them up, it's a beautiful thing, but also all sorts of. There's so much stress and anxiety right now. We had the fires here in Los Angeles, so people are very turned upside down, but the energy healing is super powerful. And something that you mentioned that cesarean is a major abdominal surgery. Even though we've simplified it, the effect it has on your body, even when it goes great, doesn't end when you come home. There's all this scar tissue layers and layers of scar tissue that are developing underneath. That I think are grossly under cared for, and we've started a program for cesarean recovery that starts on day three.
Speaker 1:Oh, I love that.
Speaker 2:With things that you can do at home for the first couple of weeks and then we start manually working on it. Week five yeah, anybody who's in town and anybody who's not in town who wants to learn these things other providers we're always happy to teach and try to get more accessibility to more people for these techniques.
Speaker 1:I love that. Thank you so much. I'm sure your patients are waiting right now for you. So I'll let you go, but I really appreciate you coming on my podcast so that I can interview you Thanks so much for having me have a great day. Thanks, you too.
