California College of Midwives
3889 Middlefield Road
Palo Alto, Ca 94303
650 / 328-8491
www.collegeofmidwives.org
Medical Board of California
1426 Howe Ave
Sacramento, Ca 95814
October 19, 2003
RE: DVD & Copy of correspondence with Dr Joyce
Brothers
Dear MBC Member/Staff,
Enclosed is material for the members of the Division of
Licensing to consider prior to the November 7th hearing on the
proposed midwifery regulations. The California College of Midwives would
like to see this type of multi-media information included as a part of any
in-service education for Medical Board staff members who deal with the
midwifery licensing program and for the OAL judges who may be called upon to
adjudicate midwifery-related cases. This would be of great benefit to all in
establishing the fundamental difference between standards for obstetrical
care and those for physiological management as employed by licensed
midwives.
The first enclosure is a DVD that I have edited
together to demonstrate the profound difference between medical management
of normal labor and birth and the physiological management of normal labor
and birth as practiced by family-practice physicians and midwives.
The video footage of medical care was originally
broadcast on reality TV programs, primarily the TLC series called “Baby
Story.” This Learning Channel program has an ACOG fellow, California
obstetrician Dr Peter Weiss, as their medical consultant. I believe we can
assume that the medical practices as portrayed are considered by ACOG to be
the standard of care for obstetrical providers.
It is possible that the computer format used to record
this DVD will not play on your commercial DVD player. This incompatibility
manifests in one of two ways – the player either won’t recognize the
disk at all or, more likely, will play the first half OK and then begin to
skip at an increasing rate until it finally stops playing altogether. If
available, try a different DVD player or your computer’s DVD drive. But if
this DVD copy is unplayable on your equipment, leave a message at 650/328-8491
with your name and mailing address and I will mail you a VHS copy.
The second enclosure is a copy of my response to
a syndicated column by Dr Joyce Brothers that was published in several
hundred newspapers across the country. Unfortunately,
Dr Brothers’ advice to the public about the relative safety of
community-based midwifery care reiterated the misleading information
originally published in the Pang study. The ACOG Journal published a study
in August 2002, entitled “Outcomes of Planned Home Births in Washington
State” by Pang et al, that was severely marred by selection and
measurement bias and was ultimately misleading in the extreme. A copy
of this study was submitted to the Medical Board last December by ACOG as a
part of their testimony objecting to the adoption of the proposed midwifery
regulations. According to ACOG, the Pang study established that hospital
birth was twice as safe as home-based care. Therefore, ACOG urged the
Medical Board to restrict the practice of licensed midwives to institutional
settings.
The Pang study claimed to have authoritatively
documented that merely planning to labor at home doubled the
perinatal mortality rate, even though at least 85% of these poor outcomes
occurred among babies who were actually born in the hospital (N= 269 of the
279 hospital transfers / total of 20 perinatal deaths out of 6,133 midwifery
patients). However, to come up with statistics favorable to the obstetrical
profession’s conventional objections, they had to design their study in
three strategic ways.
In order to get sufficient numbers to provide
statistical “significance,” they had to include pregnancies from 34
weeks forward. Midwives do not provide home-based birth services until after
37 completed weeks of pregnancy.
Since Washington State birth certificates do not
collect data on planned place of birth, Pang et al. used a set of
artificial criteria to define planned home birth that did not include the
actual plan/intention as defined by the midwives or the parents. They
erroneously included unplanned precipitous premature births at home.
In addition, mothers who were initially assessed in labor by their midwives,
were determined to have an obvious complication, and were immediately
transported to the hospital were also included in the planned home birth
cohort. Relative to the stated purpose of the study -- to contrast outcomes
for planned home labors and births with those of planned hospitalization --
it is a fatal methodological flaw to include such flagrantly unplanned labors/births
in their statistical set.
Last but not least, the authors excluded all operative
deliveries from the planned hospital birth cohort. Thus they discounted all
the complications associated with the 30% rate of forceps, vacuum extraction
and cesarean births that is the common experience of healthy mothers cared
for under obstetrical protocols.
These authors had to use extremely manipulated data to
come up with this tiny fraction of difference – perinatal mortality rate
of 3.3 per 1000 vs. 1.7 per 1000. (Please note that numerous studies give a
perinatal mortality rate of 2 per 1000 for healthy women whether they give
birth in the home, birth center or hospital.) Were the authors to have used
actual numbers and the appropriate study design, physiological management by
midwives in non-medical setting would have been proven to be protective
of both mothers and babies, reducing the operative rate (and associated
complications) from 37% to approximately 5% with a virtually identical
perinatal mortality rate.
I hope you find this information helpful in your
governance of the midwifery profession as it functions under the regulatory
authority of the Medical Board of California.
Faith Gibson, LM, CPM
Executive Director,
California College of Midwives
Cc:
Senator Liz Figueroa
Frank Cuny,
California Citizens for Health Freedom