RNS: Healthy Healing After Delivery, July 2009
TIME: 2:28
URL: http://www2.med.umich.edu/prmc/media/newsroom/details.cfm?ID=1208
U-M Health Minute: Today’s top health issues and medical research
New moms urged to take care of postpartum health
Suggested lead: Childbirth may be the most natural thing in the world, but that certainly doesn’t mean it’s easy! Over half of women suffer from postpartum ailments. Many of these women suffer in silence, embarrassed to talk with their doctor or even their friends about these difficulties. The University of Michigan is offering a unique program to assist these new moms. Here is Andi McDonnell with more. . .
First-time mom Brandi Phare thought she was all alone when she began suffering postpartum ailments. She experienced pain as a result of multiple tears on her body from giving birth, and also faced severe incontinence.
Unbeknownst to Phare, she was in the majority.
“I was totally surprised because no one ever tells you anything. I think they reserve it so that they think you would never have kids if you knew about it but no, I was shocked. And afterwards I would tell people that I was having problems and they would say ‘oh yeah I had that’ and I was just like why would you not tell people? Why would you not warm them?”
Many women wrongly believe that postpartum ailments are simply a part of giving birth, and that they need not be addressed.
Dr. Dee Fenner, (M.D.), director of the University of Michigan Health System’s Healthy Healing After Delivery Program, professor in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, director of both Gynecology and Surgical Services, and the Harold Furlong Professor urges women to take care of their own health after delivery, not solely their infant’s.
“It’s very common for women to have pelvic floor dysfunction after delivery. Easily over half of women who have vaginal birth, at least their first birth, will have some problem in terms of bowel or bladder, sexual dysfunction that can occur.”
Fenner explaines . . .
“At the University of Michigan we’ve had a long-standing interest in birth. Over the last 20 to 30 years there’s been great collaboration between the school of nursing, the medical school, the department of obstetrics and gynecology and the colleagues even with the School of Engineering and so we’ve looked at the mechanics and what goes on with birth. And so we’ve tried to translate all of our understanding of what goes on with the muscles and the nerves and the tissues in the vagina and around the vagina and bladder and how they work and what happens with delivery into what we can do to help women after having a baby.”
The U-M clinic involves physicians, nurses, midwifes, physical therapists and more to offer comprehensive postpartum care to new mothers. The program offers education in the form of teaching sheets that say what is normal or abnormal, when to worry and when to just wait for healing to occur. It also offers pelvic floor training, in addition to other programs and medications. It is open to any woman, regardless of where she delivered her baby.
Andi McDonnell, U-M Health System News
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