My wife had knee replacement surgery two weeks ago. She was given an epidural for the procedure and it worked well for her. Our two children were born back in 79 & 82 (20th century) and epidurals were available but only as some sort of last resort so she did not get them.
Epidurals are a miracle technology
81–90 of 102 posts
Re: Epidurals are a miracle technology
#82Anecdata, but I spoke to a mom here who declined an epidural during childbirth by choice. Her son is a champion big wave surfer.
are you suggesting that epidural usage or not during childbirth is correlated in some way with athletic ability of the child, decades later?
Re: Epidurals are a miracle technology
#83I have no clue why I decided to read this, but I am glad I did. Good read.
Re: Epidurals are a miracle technology
#84> This is partly because there aren't enough anesthetists
For those of you who didn't think this was a word (which was me 60 seconds ago) it is a word, and is technically correct as opposed to anesthesiologists
Re: Epidurals are a miracle technology
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
Medical professionals in the US make multiples of what the same professionals make in Europe.
This gets said a lot and it kind of irks me. (I am a physician.) US software devs also make 2x what their European colleagues do, but that never gets called out as bloat. Plus US software devs make that 2x pay without taking our additional loans for medical school at the rate of $75k per year or doing years of low pay residency where their salary doesn’t give them the means to pay off those loans.
Right - but the big difference is that the received wisdom for healthcare is that the higher cost in the US is an unfathomable mystery and/or due to "waste". If you said "writing software is more expensive in the US because software engineers there have higher salaries" everyone one would nod their head in agreement.
Re: Epidurals are a miracle technology
#86Anecdata, but I spoke to a mom here who declined an epidural during childbirth by choice. Her son is a champion big wave surfer.
are you suggesting that epidural usage or not during childbirth is correlated in some way with athletic ability of the child, decades later?
The mother said it was a conscious decision to promote birthing a strong, resilient child, based on her belief on the matter. I have no view, but it's an interesting report, given that her kid truly is an athletic outlier.
Re: Epidurals are a miracle technology
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
are you suggesting that epidural usage or not during childbirth is correlated in some way with athletic ability of the child, decades later?
The mother said it was a conscious decision to promote birthing a strong, resilient child, based on her belief on the matter. I have no view, but it's an interesting report, given that her kid truly is an athletic outlier.
if she was committed enough to raising a healthy child that she was willing to skip an epidural and endure hours of excruciating pain
...do you think that same commitment might have shown up in other ways in her parenting? such as in the foods she fed her child, or the activities she encouraged that child to do?
man, I remember when I used to come to HN because the average intelligence level of the comments was higher than it was on reddit.
Re: Epidurals are a miracle technology
#88Male scheduled for my 3rd epidural with steroids next week for on-going spinal stenosis, relieves pain for a few days, then back to pain. Will go for minimally invasive micro laminectomy next, tired of treating symptoms and not the root cause. In that procedure surgeon will remove parts of lower vertebrae that is pinching the nerve bundle, nerves that progress down each leg. Success rates of better than 70%, it's a g…
Go for surgery if you have neurological symptoms (loss of sensation, motor function, etc). If its pain, try your best to avoid surgery and find the right physiotherapist to help you be pain free. Spine surgery is risky and there is a risk of cascading failures. Don't completely trust any anesthesiologist (pain management) or neurosurgeon (for surgery) or chiropractor or random folks advice to do yoga/stretch. Spend q…
Have already tried chiropractic, PT, several back exercises daily for a year or more, got recommended by 2 customers to a doc who is a specialist in radio ablation of the sensory nerves in the lower spinal region (medicare requires 2 epidurals 2 weeks apart before they would approve the RA). The RA worked great for less than a year, had another RA, worked for several months. 1 month ago had my 3rd RA, after that is when the pain got rather serious, follows the sciatic nerve across the buttocks and down each leg to the foot. Lately it alternates from each side, several days on one side, then several days on the other side.
I have not requested serious pain pills, applying clove oil (eugenol) mixed with benzocaine all over the lower back and buttocks, (lidocaine 5% is useless) wait 10 to 15 min, then can arise in morning from bed for a day's work, yet nagging pain most of day. I refuse OTC NSAID's as they can damage the heart over time. My spinal X-ray looks like an F1 racetrack. Doc says scoliosis, yet no one in my family has this genetically. At some point it just get's so frustrating you start to realize that surgery may be the only way out. Spoke to an 80 year old once who said he had the procedure, they had him up and walking the hospital floors after he awoke from the anesthesia, let him go home next day (I guess his was uncomplicated and straightforward).
Re: Epidurals are a miracle technology
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was shocked to discover that if a woman gets an epidural, it stops producing oxytocin that mitigates the pain for the baby (and mom). That sounds absolutely horrible for that little creature. Yet I am a man, so I really am not allowed to speak on the matter and I absolutely let my wife decide entirely on the matter by herself (we had absolutely no time for an epidural, my wife delivered both kids way too fast)
I looked for a source for this, and found the opposite: > Newborn oxytocin levels were higher in the umbilical artery vs. umbilical vein, and both were higher than maternal plasma levels, implying substantial fetal oxytocin production in labour. Newborn oxytocin levels were not further elevated following maternal intrapartum synthetic oxytocin, suggesting that synthetic oxytocin at clinical doses does not cross from…
Interesting! I remember somebody telling me that at the hospital, so this feels awkward. I do wonder if the epidural maybe negatively affects the production?
I have no clue, but that's a big relief.
Re: Epidurals are a miracle technology
#90HARD disagree. Watch “the business of being born”. We’ve turned a fairly routine extremely biologically conserved process into this insanely traumatic experience.
extremely biologically conserved process This seems just plain wrong. It is not at all extremely biologically conserved. Pregnancy and birth varies wildly across species. Not conserved. For primates, it's got problems; in humans, pregnancy is an absolute mess. The birth itself is historically one of the most dangerous things a woman can do, and remains not exactly a walk in the park even with the best of modern inter…
Plus even if it were conserved--in the sense that all our relatives have settled on the same winning-strategy with little variation--there's still a naturalistic fallacy waiting in there.
Does the popularity of cancers as one ages mean we should just let people die because Nature Always Knows Best?