©Pregnancy bliss 2008

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Pain as an essential part of labor

Should labor be painful? Labor and delivery are unique and very personal experiences. The concept of "whose body is it, anyway?", so flagrantly abused in various settings, is probably quite valid in labor. This is a physio­logical rather than a disease process. It is, therefore, logical that the individual undergoing it should have the final word on how she wants to go through it.

 

Pain as a sensation is unpleasant but essential for our wellbeing. It allows us to move away from an injurious situation. A patient who has lost the ability to feel pain is at great risk of sustaining serious injury. Leprosy is a case in point.

 

A purely medical perspective is that no pain is ever necessary for any process: physiological, pathological or therapeutic.

 

Over the centuries, the primary and immediate aim of a physician was and remains to relieve pain and make the individual comfortable. This is why doctors will almost always positively encourage laboring women to have effect­ive pain control in labor. However, if the woman feels that relieving pain will make the birth experience somehow less profound, this view will be respected. After all, as the cliché above goes: whose body is it, anyway?

 

Is labor always painful?

Not experiencing pain or getting very little pain is a rare exception. Only a handful of women do or will experience a painless labor naturally. The overwhelming majority of women find labor painful or very painful.

 

It is very difficult to grade such a subjective thing as pain and making comparisons of the amount of pain among individuals is a futile exercise. Suffice to say, most women feel that labor pain is severe enough to require strong pain control. The individual woman concerned may decline this as a matter of choice.

 

Labor pain relief without drugs

The most popular form of non-medication pain relief in labor to date is the TENS machine. TENS stands for Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation. This is based on the theory that by repeatedly stimulating sensory receptors in the skin using light electrical impulses, the pain arising from the womb and cervix will be inhibited.

 

TENS works well for some people but is probably only effective in the latent phase and early labor. Few women find it sufficiently effective in established labor, unless it is supplemented with something else. It is also used by some women in the immediate period after delivery to control after-pains. The main attractions are its non-invasive nature and being non-pharmacological.

 

Other non-pharmacological pain control methods are hypnotism, the use of which is not widespread; and psyche prophylaxis, in the form of exhaustive antenatal education about pain in labor. This may positively influence the perception of pain.

 

 

 

 

 

The main attractions of TENS machine for pain control in labor is the fact that no drugs are involved. The woman is also in full control