Oh Mama … Perinatal Integrative Healthcare

Preface

The reason one vitamin can cure so many illnesses is because a deficiency of one vitamin can cause many illnesses.

Andrew Saul, therapeutic nutritionist

If there is one mindset required, perhaps more than anything else, when working with integrative medicine, it is always maintaining a deep respect for pragmatic real-world research, new knowledge, and innovative methodologies.

Also considering the unceasing conservatives’ anti-alternative rhetoric, let me add a personal observation: not liking a person and not liking a person’s opinion are two completely different things. And lest we forget, when we choose not to like a person because of their opinion, that rigid narrow outlook is termed small-mindedness.

When I step back in time, to when I began my university studies, this is when I began to discover fundamentally, as a burgeoning health professional, that although modern medicine talks of the body naturally seeking homeostatic equilibrium, the reality is the training of our hospital doctors focuses its teaching on pathophysiology – not wellness.

I learned hospitals are rife with something called nosocomial infections – bugs that dominantly only live in hospital wards, which gives us the acronym HAI (hospital-acquired infections).

I learned that if I want to get knowledgeable about health – as opposed to being knowledgeable about dis-ease – then I need to learn these insights from the naturopathic therapeutic modalities, especially those most ancient. Because let’s face it, modern scientific medicine has been correcting its incorrect advice since the beginning of its inception.

If we take the humble chicken egg as one simple example:

Thousands of years ago the chicken egg was regarded as an easy-to-hunt nutritious food source.

Then 3000 years ago the chicken and its eggs became a domesticated healthy food supply.

In the 1950s–60s, well-known advert slogans were created, like A chicken in every pot and When there’s an egg in the house, there’s a meal in the house (interestingly, the latter jingle was first coined by my own father, Ron Boon, as the marketing executive managing the NZ Egg Board’s advertising).

In the 1970s, cholesterol research decreed no more than three eggs a week to avoid cardiovascular disease (a scientific announcement that devastated commercial egg farming at the time). Plus, in the 1970s movie Rocky, Sylvester Stallone drinks raw eggs on screen, which lit a fire under its consumption for body-builders (with nutritionists arguing there’s more protein in cooked eggs, and bacteriologists warning of the potential for salmonella poisoning).

In the 1980s, nutrition guideliners set out to re-educate the public’s growing scepticism around egg cholesterol being bad, and by the 1990s new nutrition guidelines stated 1.5 eggs a day equates to permissible cholesterol (and the public mused how to cut an uncooked egg in half).

In the 2000s, many countries around the world started to remove all national weekly dietary restrictions on eggs, and by 2013 latest research headlines around the world were confirming no association whatsoever between egg consumption and cardiovascular disease.

Interesting aside: in 2016 the oldest living person on earth, Emma Morano, was crediting her longevity to eating raw eggs (and her physician publicly confirmed her cholesterol levels were excellent).

And today what is medical science’s current understandings around eating chicken eggs? Well, these days we know there is actually a distinct correlation between eating eggs daily and reduced cardiovascular disease. Now the motto is An egg a day keeps the doctor away.

Good grief.

And this is just the simplest summary of medical science’s journey around one basic food source!

Such constant drastic revisions of medical advice makes questioning medical advice not just a reasonable thing to do, but actually an intelligently logical thing to do. Without entering the inoculation debate, it is interesting to note that for many years now, the lowest vaccination rates in Sydney, Australia have been occurring within the most affluent suburbs (no longer the lower socio-economic areas). The God Syndrome for doctors has disintegrated. Dr Google and Dr YouTube are having stronger influences on the tertiary-educated parents of today – and that’s a massive swing in societal mentality away from trusting mainstream medicine.

So yes, like many of us today, we are realizing that if we want to get knowledgeable about health – as opposed to being knowledgeable about dis-ease – then we need to open our minds towards the radical and even the fringe, and certainly towards the traditional and most ancient, and without doubt towards the innovative and cutting edge.

If your child is premature, or they break a bone, or they have an anatomical abnormality – then modern paediatrics, especially surgically, can potentially save your child’s life with miraculous scientific technology.

However, the fact is abundantly clear we have exponentially increasing levels of hospitals full of patients with chronic long-term coronary disease, and cancer victims begging life to consecrate them to the status of cancer survivors – all being provided healthcare that continues to feed our sick with white breads, overcooked soggy vegetables and random gelatinous desserts. How on this earth can our healthcare systems remain so nutritiously dumb?

And then of course we have Big Pharma – a juggernaut that would bankrupt instantly if a simple, natural, inexpensive cure for cancer was confirmed. We must all face the facts: there are just too many trillions of dollars tied up in Big Pharma to avoid corruption.

In the UK today, three times as many people die annually from the side effects of their prescribed medications versus the numbers who die in vehicle accidents. It’s true, yet a statistic rarely talked about.

In the USA today, over six million children have been diagnosed with ADHD, equivalent to two children in every American classroom being medicated. It’s talked about inperpetuum, but commercially it’s great business.

I could write a novel on the corruption within Big Pharma!

Additional to all the physiological disease is the rampant psychological disease. Statistics show that a phenomenal quarter of our adult Western population annually are prescribed anti-depressants; including almost one-third of our working mothers – then again, the full-time stay-at-home mothers are statistically even more at risk for depression.

Today our Ritalin- and Ventolin-fed hyper-allergenic children are being cared for by their Losec- and Prozac-fed parents, and babysat by their warfarin- and insulin -fed grandparents.

We are now entire nations of overfed, undernourished, recurrently diseased, and desperately depressed people.

We must seriously question why we have become the sickliest generation ever to exist, when it’s never been so possible to be healthy. And we must ask why we have become one of the saddest generations of humans ever to have roamed this Earth, when human life has never had so many labour-saving luxuries.

In the words of renowned nutrition scientist Professor Jeffrey Bland, so much of the population today is vertically ill – not sick enough to be lying down (horizontally ill), but certainly not well.

However today, as women, as parents, and as patients, we are demanding a new paradigm!

In September 2014, Emma Watson, lead actor from the eight Harry Potter movies, and UN Women Goodwill Ambassador, delivered a riveting address to the United Nations on women’s rights. Adapting the speech specifically to the topic of maternity care, is so apt:

If obstetric medicine doesn’t have to control, women’s naturopathic medicine won’t have to be controlled. Both modern obstetrics and traditional naturopathics should feel free to be sensitive. Both obstetrics and naturopathics should feel free to be strong.

It is time we all perceive all medicine on one spectrum instead of two sets of opposing ideals.

I want consulting obstetricians to take up this mantel, so that their obstetric registrars can be free from birthing narrow-mindedness. But also, so that their own daughters have permission to embrace naturopathically assisted normal childbirth too, reclaiming those parts of their own intuitive Mother Nature they’d abandoned. And in doing so, become a more complete and fulfilled version of themselves.

As health professionals, if we stop defining each other by what we are not, and start defining ourselves by who we are, birthing women can all be freer.

Introduction

The idea of minimum or maximum amounts of any nutrient is utterly ridiculous! We’ve gotten so chemically smart we’re stupid.

Don Tolman, self-care wholefood activist

In 2014–2015, I was the founding director of a global inaugural conference on integrative maternity healthcare, which was a ground-breaking and revolutionary symposium, held in Auckland, New Zealand. This conference promoted a cross-discipline exchange of progressive research, innovative knowledge, enlightened experience and radical ideas; all in a medically professional and universally holistic environment of visionary open-mindedness.

Until then, maternity health specialists could convene only under their individual professional organizational umbrellas – but this symposium was, at last, a gathering for all maternity professionals to connect and communicate with each other. From midwives to medical herbalists, from hypnobirthers to homeopaths, from obstetricians to osteopaths, and every therapeutic discipline in between; with our collective goal being to uphold the World Health Organization mandate:

Optimal health and wellbeing are inclusive of the physical, social, psychological, emotional and spiritual dimensions of life.

At the same time, working in maternity care for the past decades, I have always yearned for the availability of an IMHC (Integrative Maternity HealthCare) guidebook that summarizes an overview of these ancient and contemporary wisdoms … a literary place where all maternity health specialists of every therapeutic modality are convened together, contained within one succinct and user-friendly introductory handbook. And, as the old adage says, I came to the full realization If it is to be, it is up to me. Thus, this book.

To be logical, we need to begin with definitions:

What are CAMs and T&CMs?

CAMs (complementary and alternative medicines) and T&CMs (traditional and complementary medicines) are fundamentally the same animal – and can roughly be divided into five sub-categories:

Traditional medicines (e.g. homeopathy, medical herbalism, essential oils, Chinese medicine, Indian Ayurveda)

Mind-body connections (e.g. meditation, spiritual healing, NLP [neuro-linguistic programming], music, dance)

Biological nourishment (e.g. diet, vitamins, minerals, supplements)

Body manipulation (e.g. chiropractic, osteopathy)

Energy healing (e.g. reiki, qigong, pulsed electromagnetic fields).

What are HTMMs and AMMAs?

At IIMHCO we believe it is inappropriate to describe any one therapy of medicine as being mainstream, conventional or orthodox. The medicine that is mainstream for any human being (i.e. normal, ordinary, and used by the local majority) depends entirely on where you live. The medicine that is conventional (i.e. regular, conforming, established) depends on what the usual norm is within your cultural traditions. And the medicine that is orthodox (i.e. approved, accepted, standard) can only be determined by the behaviour that conforms within your local society.

Consequently, it is logical we permanently re-define treatment modalities as:

HTMMs – holistic traditional and modern medicines (what many currently refer to as CAMs or T&CMs, which have historically focused on eliminating the cause of dis-ease)

AMMAs – allopathic modern medicine alternatives (what many currently refer to as mainstream conventional medicine, which has empirically focused on reducing the symptoms of disease).

What is IM (integrative medicine)?

Integrative medicine (IM) is healing-oriented medicine that is holistic (i.e. takes account of the whole person). It focuses on eliminating the cause of symptoms, rather than only reducing the side effects of symptoms.

IM also emphasizes the therapeutic relationship between practitioner and patient; is informed by evidence; and potentially makes use of multiple therapies.

At its root foundation, IM incorporates the use of both HTTMs and AMMAs.

What is IMHC/PIM?

Integrative maternity healthcare (IMHC) is specifically the maternity healthcare division of IM (integrative medicine). Thus, IMHC can also be called PIM (perinatal integrative medicine) i.e. holistic maternal/neonatal wellness.

IMHC definition

When the medical and the holistic; the modern and the traditional; the allopathic and the naturopathic; all respect how they complement each other, to deliberately form a united revolution of cohesive evolution, to create the ultimate in best maternity care.

In practical terms, IMHC or PIM can be witnessed successfully operating first-hand at an IM maternity antenatal clinic, when for example all under one roof, a woman can see her customary midwife, her medical obstetrician, her traditional doula, a holistic homeopath, a naturopathic herbalist, plus other therapies such as ancient acupuncture and modern osteopathy.

Important points to note regarding this book

This is a birth practitioner’s introductory overview to IMHC (integrative maternity healthcare). This is not a definitive textbook reference on perinatal integrative medicine.

Please do not use the information contained within this book to definitively treat or