Thursday, January 13, 2011

What is natural nowadays?

Natural – what is natural nowadays? So many cosmetic products have natural written all over them. Others use colour or images to suggest that they are natural. Even some foods have natural written on them but what does this really mean? Research seems to state that there are not any legal standards for what constitutes a natural food product. It seems to be the same rules for natural cosmetics. So why do producers use the word natural and how do we as consumers fall into their trap? Most of us want to be as healthy as possible, both inside and out but we’re not really sure how to do it. We hear the five a day rule for fruit and vegetables and we try and stick to it but often that is as far as our health knowledge goes. When we see something that suggests it is natural, either by writing the word natural on it or using packaging to indicate this we jump at it. As more and more manufacturers become aware of this marketing tool more and more products are being advertised as natural. In my opinion it won’t be long before all cosmetics have the word natural on them and all food products use packaging to suggest they are natural. Is this our mistake as consumers though? Are we misinterpreting the word natural? I don’t think so. For me natural means taken from a natural source with no modification, for example the ‘natural’ face wash could be made with oatmeal and milk, yet somehow when I go shopping I am drawn to the more natural looking products. Recently I have learnt that natural does not mean natural and I now base my purchasing decisions on other factors. Are you doing the same? I think manufacturers could be shooting themselves in the foot. As others learn that natural does not mean natural they too will purchase items for other reasons. There is also the thought that on some occasions we may not want natural. What if I want to buy something for a special occasion that has been modified to produce a better flavour or perhaps better results? What if the real natural product hasn’t helped reduce the redness of my spot or the natural wine doesn’t taste as good as the normal wine? Would I then opt for the product that doesn’t suggest it’s natural even though it may contain exactly the same ingredients as the product next to it with natural written all over it? Be careful manufacturers sometimes taking something too far can produce negative results!

Juliet Hollingsworth

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Running away from success

Fear of success... really? I hear you ask. It is really quite a common thing to be scared of success. Success tests people, it can show weaknesses or flaws and it’s scary. Sometimes it’s just easier to carry on right where you are – plodding along, staying in the safe zone. A sign of a fear of success is self sabotage. Procrastinating, making excuses for why you can’t do what you need to do. Pushing snooze on the alarm so that you arrive late for an important event. Those that have a fear of success do not necessarily realise it.

You see, we all know how to cope with failure, we can all work failure. There is the sadness, then if we are lucky we can talk ourselves out of that “well it wasn’t meant to be”, “something else will come along”, “there’s always next time”. We pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off and get on with the next big thing. What happens however if we succeed? How do we deal with that success? When one is successful there is often not anyone to follow, success can bring leadership – this can be scary as with leadership comes responsibility.

Sometimes a fear of success is brought about by a feeling of not being worthy of that success. A feeling of not being good enough, the success may come along naturally but are you running away from it? To achieve success the first step is to recognise that you are good enough and that you do deserve that success. Everyone deserves success; and anyone who works hard to achieve it deserves it even more. If the success comes your way then you must be good enough.

The first thing to do is work out where you really want to be. Then a plan needs to be put into place to remove all of the sabotage habits that have built up. Focus on the success, the positive aspects of the success and steer away from the fears that surround it. Get your plan in order – write a list and begin to see the wood through the trees. Start with the first thing on the list or at the beginning of your plan. There is no need to think about what you do not want to happen, it is fine to simply focus on what we do want to happen.

Use visualisation tricks to see yourself as the successful person you want to be, feel how it feels to be that person, and start to believe that you are that person. As the positive patterns become habit the previous habits will start to disappear, every step in your path to success will help you to realise that it is not so scary after all, and the fear of success will begin to evaporate.

Juliet Hollingsworth Hypnotherapy

Monday, January 10, 2011

Natural Birthing

On 6 January 2011 I googled the word natural, the second entry to appear was Medical Videos - Natural Vaginal Child Birth Delivery Video ... If you click on the link (beware it is quite graphic!) you will see that this links to a five minute video of a natural birth. This is the Natural Vaginal Child Birth Delivery Video. 2,792 people have liked this video and shared it on facebook suggesting that there are many people out there who like the idea of a natural birth. In our society today it is all too easy to opt for drugs to relieve pain or even elect for a caesarean in order to not have to ‘go through’ a labour experience.

Understandably there are births that come with complications and require medical intervention such as a delivery aided by forceps or ventouse or even an emergency caesarean but if this is not medically necessary is there a better way? I recently read an article on the Mail Online website Maternity meltdown: A devastating firsthand account of the chaos on wards - and why overweight mums are partly to blame. The article talks about staff shortages on labour wards and how this is becoming a major problem. The author does suggest that the number of births in the hospital that she works in has more than doubled over the past couple of years but she also says that a woman who is about to give birth and has been given an epidural is meant to be monitored constantly. Nowadays so many women are asking for epidurals surely this must take up much needed time as the midwives monitor these women continually. Having an epidural can also slow down labour so the women need to be looked after for longer periods.

The majority of pregnant woman avoid certain chemicals such as those in cigarettes and alcohol during pregnancy. There are also certain medications that pregnant woman should refrain from taking along with a selection of foods. A question I always ask is, why when having kept away from all of these things for 40 weeks would you then go and give your baby a shot of a chemical that in normal circumstances you would not let anywhere near you? Pethadine for example is a synthetic form of morphine. Diacetylmorphine (better known as heroin) was synthesized from morphine in 1874 and brought to market by Bayer in 1898. Yet many women - justifiably - find the pain of childbirth too difficult to experience and at the last minute are happy to be injected with these chemicals and in turn pass the chemical onto the baby. In some cases the fear associated with the pain could result in a prolonged labour and the pain relief/medical intervention become necessary but wouldn’t it be worth trying something else to help avoid this situation? Having a natural birth can be an amazing experience; using HypnoBirth can help to achieve a natural birth, most couples that have used the Fertility2Birth HypnoBirth programme have achieved the natural birth they so desired. For the mother, a natural birth increases the probability of an easier, healthier recovery due to no chemicals in the body, cutting of the perineum bruises from IV lines, or severe headache or backache due to side effect of epidurals. For the baby, a natural birth reduces the exposure to chemicals. A natural birth also reduces the likelihood of needing to separate the infant from its mother after birth, important for successful breastfeeding and bonding. Surely it’s worth a go to avoid taking in these chemicals, to avoid passing the chemicals on to your baby and to help out those busy midwives. You never know you might be able to tell your baby that his or her entrance to the world was an enjoyable magical experience.

Juliet Hollingsworth

Fertility & birth specialist at On Harley Street

Thursday, January 6, 2011

Spontaneous Birth Reflex / Maternal-Fetal Ejection Reflex / Natural Expulsive Reflex

Spontaneous Birth Reflex / Maternal-Fetal Ejection Reflex / Natural Expulsive Reflex

Research taken from:

ACDM ~ California College of Midwives ~

Characteristics of Clinical Competency

June 2001 Technical Bulletin #5

~ Maternal-Fetal Ejection Reflex ~

Designer Genes program a natural “labor saving devise”, the fruit of a physically and psychologically undisturbed labor in a healthy mother



There is a large difference between undisturbed spontaneous labour and birth. At a spontaneous birth (and by spontaneous I mean where the birth is undisturbed, natural and ‘with the body’) the spontaneity can be seen as a naturally advancing process combining biological and psychological resources making the birth tolerable for the woman and safe for the baby. It is accompanied by a dramatic increase in childbirth specific hormones – endogenous oxytocins – to stimulate uterine activity and beta endorphins (the source of the “runner’s high”) providing natural pain relief for the mother. Maternal hormones also trigger hormone production in the foetus to prepare it to breathe independently and maintain its body temperature after birth. The understanding of this reveals the problems that can arise when trying to provide medical care to a large percentage of healthy women who, if undisturbed, will have labours graced by a “labour-saving” mechanism -- the spontaneous birth reflex.



In recognising this phenomenon Dr. Michael O’Dont first named it the Fetal Ejection Reflex. It is now common to add the word Maternal to the name to make it clear that the baby does not, independent of the mother eject itself from the body but rather the birthing mother allows the spontaneous energy to run through her to safely birth the baby. Dr O’Dont was trying to identify the biological mechanism responsible for rapid, apparently easy deliveries. The normal spontaneous birth reflex is the “physiological” process (biology + psychology) that makes birth mechanically successful, physically tolerable for the birthing mother and safe for the baby. At a certain time after the cervix is fully dilated the mother experiences a dramatic event in which the body simultaneous opens up (relaxes normal muscle resistance) while forcefully propelling her foetus downward. This reflex overcomes the usual soft tissue resistance and takes advantage of momentum to press the baby down and out. This reflex has the exact same biological chain of events as vomiting but in the opposite direction. It is a natural response similar to a reverse sneeze, or the way our body naturally moves food through itself. Historically speaking it was the inclination of second or more time birthing mothers to have very quick births that scared obstetricians and caused them to bring mothers in early and induce them by artificially rupturing the membranes.



A crucial part of the Maternal Fetal Ejection Reflex (MFER) is the psychological comfort of the mother. Michael O’Dont described this as creating psychological circumstances for the mother so she “feels secure and unobserved at the same time”. He observed that the birth attendant’s first responsibility is not to disturb the natural process. For many mothers her need to be undisturbed is balanced by an equally powerful need to be in the right place and have family members of great psychological importance, as well as the doctor or midwife present, before she can permit, at least at a subconscious level, the labour process to unfold. For those who prefer hospital care, these mothers must have arrived at the hospital before the MFER can complete itself.



The MFER is a constant exception to the rules of labour as expressed by Friedman’s Curve*, which graphically represents labour as a relentlessly slow and painful process. Most importantly, this linear concept sees labour and birth as solely dependent on hard work and the ability of the mother to tolerate the pain rather than using her internal resources to help with or surrender to her labour. The picture society has of labour and delivery is one of incredible effort in which the mother labours with slow incremental progress. The MFER is almost the opposite of that expectation. While it is impossible to predict who will experience the MFER many birth attendants have observed that a calm or confident mother is more likely to do so than a fearful, anxious one who feels greatly unsure of herself or is afraid of birth.



A true MFER appears to provide the calm that can only be matched in a medical setting through the use of an epidural. Often (but not always) the MFER is enhanced by submerging the mother in deep water after she has reached 5cm dilatation and letting her and her husband or partner focus together with as few caregiver interruptions as possible (vaginal examinations for example). Dr O’Dont describes this as permitting the mother to feel secure and unobserved at the same time. Unfortunately this spontaneous birth reflex is easily disturbed and often (but not always) obliterated by medication during the delivery period.



The MFER appears to represent in birth what sex researchers Drs Master and Johnson identified as the orgasmic plateau, that is to say a state of being during which an overriding internal mechanism triggers a series of discrete but perfectly timed and attuned events of physiology which fire off in domino fashion when the conditions are right. Hence the term orgasmic birth. At this point it is a natural reflex and happens regardless of the individual’s wishes so, during labour this means that even if contractions seem painful or the mother is clearly anxious, the labour will be briskly moving and result in a normal spontaneous vaginal delivery without anaesthesia and often, without significant perineal trauma, perhaps even before the doctor or midwife arrives.



The MFER is very much a primitive natural instinct and it is the neo-cortex part of the brain (the most recently developed) along with the disruptions of a disturbed birth (examinations, bright lights, loud noises, unfamiliar people etc) that can prevent the MFER from happening as birthing mothers often feel very far from “secure and unobserved”. The MFER is often not recognised as it can follow a lengthy and even painful latent stage. For hospital births it may include both induction and epidural before this fast-finish. The MFER often comes at the end of a long, psychologically difficult latent phase, it is not necessarily perceived by either the mother or the midwife as a “fast birth”. There are five elements for a successful normal spontaneous vaginal birth and a long latent phase appears to set up the circumstances so that all five elements are present. The five elements required are as follows:



1. A healthy Mother, a normal pregnancy & a spontaneous onset of labour at term

2. An understanding of the physiological and psychological aspects of spontaneous labour and birth by both parents and practitioners

3. Physiologically appropriate response by family and professional caregivers to the normal physical, biological and gravitational demands of spontaneous labour and birth

4. Psychologically appropriate response by family and professional caregivers to the emotional and psychological needs of the mother to the normal stresses and sensations of labour and birth

5. Willingness of the mother to accept pressure of uterine contraction and the anxiety of not knowing how much harder the process may be or how much longer the process may take.



– The absence or severe dysfunction of any of these elements can generate symptoms that may ultimately require medical or surgical intervention



Unfortunately for most women nowadays, undisturbed labour in which all five elements can be present is rarely seen.









*Dr. Friedman did his residency in the 1950s. He was not a man to suffer fools gladly and he considered a lot of his superiors to be fools. He felt that they made medical judgments based on their intuition and not on science, so he set out to accumulate the research data necessary to give the profession a firm scientific foundation.

Dr. Friedman used his spare time to compile detailed observations about every labouring woman who came through his hospital. His aim was to find out what ‘normal’ labour looked like. Using observations from tens of thousands of women, he created a curve. Women who followed the curve were almost certain to have a vaginal delivery. Women who fell off the curve were more likely to need a C-section.

Dr. Friedman was the first to say that you should not section a woman in latent phase (when contractions have started but the first stage of labour has not yet been reached) because a long latent phase was not a sign that the baby doesn't fit. He insisted that you should not section a woman in the active phase of labour unless she failed to make a certain amount of progress in a certain amount of time. When Dr. Friedman used to tell stories about the genesis of the curve, he would express the utmost disgust for doctors who would say, "She looks like a C-section to me".

Dr. Friedman was very anti forceps. He concluded, correctly, that forceps hurt babies and should be banned. He used to travel around the country testifying for the families of children who had been injured by forceps. When he would appear, the family would win.








http://www.joyousbirth.info/forums/showthread.php?t=41731&pagenumber=


Juliet Hollingsworth

Fertility & Birth Specialist at On Harley Street

Fertility2Birth HypnoBirth Programme


Fertility2Birth Fertility Programme