None. Stewart Fishbuy and Dr. Stew, thank you for joining me again in the trenches. Father Jeremy, it's nice to be, It's nice to be here with you. This is for my UK column audience. And so I know that you know the story, but if you don't mind, I'm just going to quickly contextualize how I came across you and, and it has a significant impact on my
personal life. But I suppose towards the beginning of last year, my wife and I was sitting down having lunch with a friend of ours and he said, look to my wife, you've just fallen pregnant. Have you, have you thought about home birth and more specifically something called hypno birthing? And my wife responded with fear like, that sounds crazy. Like, you know, I don't want to die. You know, I think going to hospital makes makes more sense.
And then a few weeks later, we went on a road trip and we, we, we got the audio books that he recommended and we listened and we were blown away. We couldn't believe that this idea of home birthing could actually be a legitimate thing and, and it, and it could be, it could be safe. And so while we were driving, my wife was on her phone and she was looking for some podcasts that now could maybe, you know, chat about, say something about home birth.
And she stumbled across yours and we started listening and we couldn't stop. And we just, she just went through episode after episode after episode. And and then she said, you have to get him on your podcast. This is phenomenal. Then a few months later, she attempted the home birth. There were a couple complications, as you now know, behind the scenes, but she had No Fear at all. And she said that that was actually not a scary birth whatsoever.
And we have a beautiful, healthy boy as you, as you also know. So with that in mind, my question is, why was she fearful? So first thing I want to say is I want to cry with joy at the, at your, your story. And then how, how bliss and I, if my Co host affected your, your life in a, in a positive way. That's sort of why we do what we do. You know, I'm old now. I practiced for 40 years. I was a a private physician 25 years in the hospital.
Well, 28 years in the hospital and 12 years at home. And my initial training was such that I was trained in the medicalized birth model thinking that pregnancy itself is a high risk condition and that everything about pregnancy is a potential disaster. And this is the model by which current doctors and a lot of midwives now and certainly nurses are trained in that pregnancy is an illness and needs to be treated. And so obviously, if it's an illness, you you start to fear it.
Where did this all begin? This all began in the early 1920s in my country when John D Rockefeller, who was famous for being very wealthy and, and in the petroleum industry, hired a guy named Flexner. And I'm just paraphrasing the story here, obviously for time to put out a report that basically said that the only best way to take care of people is through modern medicine, which was pharmaceutical based
and based in the hospital. And they essentially took over the medical schools and then they vilified midwives and naturopaths and alternative medicine things and it became a lucrative hospital based practice. And how do you control people best to get them to do that? You scare them. You scare them about naturopathy, you scare them about midwifery and you scare them about their own bodies that pregnancy itself could go wrong at any time. And what does a woman want more
than anything else in the world? She wants the safety of her baby. So if you can make a woman think that if she doesn't do what the doctors say, that she might in some way be harming her baby, then you can get people to do pretty much anything you want. And so fear became the tool that was used to take something as natural as conceiving, growing and birthing A mammalian baby and turning it into a disease.
And so that's where we are. And we're, you know, the granny midwives and, and older people have known this for a long time, but with they've been squashed. But if their system was so good, Jeremy, then why isn't it so good? Why did we go in the last 50-60 years from AC section rate of 5% to AC section rate? Now you told me it's closing out 80% in your country? Yes, in in the in the private sector, yes. Yeah, in my country it's in the mid 30s, right? So that's 600% increase in my
country. Why did we go to more monitoring of babies, more ultrasounds, more vaginal exams, more antibiotics, more artificial drugs, more inductions, more newborn intensive care unit admissions? Every category of things getting worse has happened. And yet the people that are running the the system are not concerned about all that they wanted. They're just concerned about controlling the system.
It really isn't about intent, it's about outcomes and the outcomes that we have in all other countries are are crappy. And yet the people that have made it crappy want to do more stuff to make it more crappier, if that's a word, But and fear is the. Way they do it. If I, if I were to scare you, if I were to pull out what they call the dead baby card, by the way, everything that I just told you that they're doing is a violation of every tenet of
medical ethics. Medical ethics dictates that given the same information, it's not reasonable to expect two people to come to the same conclusion. Medical ethics, as a decisionally capable person, has the right to determine bodily autonomy, that they have the right to refuse treatment if they choose to do so, that that you can't be touched without your permission. And yet these kind of assaults go on every day in doctors offices and hospitals around the world, and nobody says anything.
It's, it's very interesting because from the time I chatted to last year to now, my whole paradigm has shifted. And it's, it's made me so uncomfortable based on the fact that my whole life I thought something about childbirth that was completely false. And so did my wife. And so do most people in my circles. You know what? If I say home birth, they go. Are you sure about that? Yeah, well, you know, Jim Gaffigan is a comedian here in the United States.
I don't know if you know him there and he he does a stand up routine about home birth because he's had five kids and they've all been born at home. And one of the things he says is, yeah, he was talking to his friend about, yeah, he and his wife are choosing home birth. And his friend says, oh, we were thinking about that, but we wanted our baby to live so. Where does where does that come from? I mean, so OK. It's cultural.
It's cultural. I mean, if your mother was told to birth in the hospital and she had a scary event in the hospital, probably caused the term is zyatrogenic, probably caused by the treatment that she was getting. She was induced for no reason. The baby didn't like it. She had an emergency C-section and she thinks, thank God I was in the hospital because what would have happened if I'd been at home? We're not realizing that none of that would have ever happened at home.
So she has this experience and she passes this experience on down to her daughters, and her sons for that matter. And so when they grow up and they get married, they know what mom's experience was, they know what grandma's experience it was. And now we've got 4 generations of women that had forgotten what mammals know. Exactly. So when we were in, I said to you at the beginning that we went in a Roach. We we went to the Kruger National Park, which is our our
major game park. And I keep saying this, but it's definitely one of the most beautiful places in the world. And while we were looking at at giraffes and elephants and things she said to me, my wife said to me when they give birth, they don't have hospitals. They just go and find a quiet place and give birth. But why do we as humans require 7 people around the woman and she must get on her back and it's lights and it's and it's all sorts of instrumentation.
Something is wrong. Yeah, you think that, you think that every woman would have that intuition that something is wrong. But it just goes to show you how powerful fear is in in driving you away from what you what you believe is commonsensical and what your intuition tells you. When mammals give birth. I know you know this, but maybe your listeners don't know this. They go off to a quiet place and
they go off by themselves. You know, the other cows don't come around and ask the cow that's in labor how she's doing. And they don't restrict her intake. They don't take away her food and water. They don't immobilize her. They don't strap her down to to the, the, the floor of the barn. You know, if the cow wants to walk, the cow walks. If the cow wants to roll or lie down, the cow rolls your lies down. Doesn't lie on a Beck. And what? Yeah. And what?
They never lay flat on their back and do that sort of thing. And when they're ready to give birth, no one is around and the baby comes out, it falls into the dirt. It's not a sterile procedure. Matter of fact, it's better that it's not. That's the whole point. Baby's immune systems are starting to form in utero, but they're you know, but 80% of your immune system comes from
the bacteria in your gut. If you're colonized with the wrong bacteria that aren't, you know, if you're, if you're brought out by a sterile C-section, taken to a nursery, the bacteria you're being colonized with are not the ones that nature design. And in the in the wild, no one rushes in to cut the umbilical cord. As a matter of fact, if you watched an elephant or Jaff give birth, what happens? Baby falls on the ground, the cord snaps. Does the baby elephant bleed to
death? No, of course not. And maybe the fall is actually good for them. Maybe it startles them and wakes them up. Who knows? But nature has designed a system. If it didn't work, that animal would become extinct. So it works really, really well. Now people will say, well, what happens if Well, yeah, that's there's always going to be an exception and you're always going to have a problem. But and you and if you if you know some, some farmers will lose a sheep that's in labor,
it'll die. So they may help that sheep, they may reach up and pull out that baby because they know what to do, right. But if you look at the hospital system we have now, despite all of that medical technology, we're still losing mothers and babies. So it's not, there's no perfect system. There's no system that says, you know, if you follow our instructions, you'll have a perfect outcome. The the medical model is kind of sold that way, Jeremy.
It's sold that, you know, if you're in the hospital, you're only 30 feet away from an operating room, but the likelihood of you needing that operating room is increased A hundredfold simply because you're you're in the hospital and you're being treated in an anti mammalian way. You're not allowed to eat, you're not allowed to move, you're constantly interrupted. You have these belts on, you're getting vaginal exams, which increase your risk of infection
and they're uncomfortable. You have to be in a bed. By the way, here's a this is this is just a typical story. If you go to a hospital and you go into a labor room, what's the center of the labor room? What's in the center? The bed. The bed. OK, Anybody who's ever gone to a home birth, ask them when they walked into the home birth, did they ever find the mother laying in bed? No, there's candles and and and and this music, and they're on the floors.
They're in the shower. They maybe they're on all fours on the bed, but they're certainly not laying on the bed. You never see it, but the hospital puts a bed in the center of the room because what do hospitals do? They treat sick people and sick people need to be in bed.
And so when you just even the psychology of walking into a labor room and seeing the bed in the center tells you what they're thinking, because home birth and mammals would never, you know, wouldn't just they don't just go on your bed and lay there prone waiting for somebody to do something to them. That's just not how it's done. So your, your wife was right to look at these things and then it
clicks in her head. Why it doesn't is because it's because of our culture and because of our education that's made it seem like it's a valuable thing to be in the hospital. And by the way, the reason it's so valuable, it's not because it's good for the patient, it's good for the system. It makes a lot of money. And whether you're in socialized medicine or not, your hospital gets paid. Just the payer is different and
you're in a socialized system. The government pays, but the hospital bills the government for everything it does. So for every C-section they do, they get paid more than if they do a vaginal delivery. For every baby that goes into the newborn intensive care unit, they get paid more than if a baby goes on to mom's chest and they don't get to do anything to that baby. So what is the incentive of people running a hospital who are trying to make a profit to
lower their intervention rate? There isn't one. It's all backwards. We should start rewarding people in hospitals that have a lower C-section rate. They should get paid more per delivery. The lower your C-section rate is, they should. Go ahead. Sorry. Go on. Oh, I could go on forever. You go ahead. No. Well, OK, so so let's just create some some sort of context, because whenever you talk about a home birth, the very first response is that it's more dangerous than a hospital
birth. Oh, you're asking me what I think about that? Yes. Is it true? Yeah, it's absolutely not more dangerous. As a matter of fact, though, the world literature doesn't support that. It's more dangerous. It's it's exactly the opposite. Again, hyperbole and lying is what is what tyrannical people do to get control of you. They're, you know, they're they're making they're, they're they're making it up now. Is home birth for everybody? No, of course not.
There are certain things that you should not be doing at home, but informed decision making is for everybody. It should be everybody's decision to decide where I want to give birth, how I want to give birth, and who the hell I'm going to invite into my birth space. All right. When you go to the hospital, you have strangers. That's, that doesn't make a mammal feel comfortable. A mammal needs to feel safe.
When a mammal is laboring, whether it's your dog, a cat or a, a deer or or a farm animal and a predator approaches or little kids run into the room where there's a forest fire or brush fire, like like I just had, the mammal is going to stop contracting. It's going to put out adrenaline and it's going to get up and it's going to run away. That's, that's how nature ensures the best chance of
survival. So when you scare people into saying that it's not safe at home and and that that's propaganda, it's the safest place you can possibly be for most women, because that's how mammal, mammalian birth is designed, is to be done basically alone by, you know, in a safe place. But one of the driving factors is pain, so they go, well, I'd rather go to the hospital so
they can reduce the pain. Pain is something that again, you, if you, if you emphasize it all right, it, it, it becomes sort of of a focus again, you can make people focus on the wrong thing. First of all, there's two things about pain. First of all, you know, I wrote AI wrote a blog once when blogs were still a thing called labor is not a toothache. And because a lot of doctors will say, well, you wouldn't get a tooth pulled without novocaine. Why would you have a baby
without an epidural? That kind of thinking just tells you how obtuse these people are. They don't understand. Because if you really understand biology and you understand evolution and whether you believe in creation or not isn't important here that I'm talking about. You know, if you believe in evolution, then bad things tend to evolve away and, and, and things that are beneficial tend to become more common. That's how it works. That's why some insects look like sticks, right?
It makes it more likely they're going to survive. So when you have a woman that is in labor, you have to ask yourself, why is labor painful? Because it doesn't behoove a a mammal in the wild to be moaning or making noise because it's going to attract a predator. So mammals have learned to be quiet in the wild, but we know that their labor is still painful. So this is a theory can't be proven because no one's going to study it.
But maybe labor is painful for a reason, because every time you experience discomfort, you're and these again, these are short little surges, They last 30 to 60 seconds and then you get a couple minutes of a break and then you do it again. It allows your body to recharge its its hormones and recharge its neurotransmitters, recharge its receptors and gives you a little bit of a break. But this pain, when you have it, you're secreting things. You're secreting endorphins,
which are your body's opiates. You're secreting oxytocin, which is making your contractions happen, but it also makes you feel warm and loved and bonded. You're secreting maybe some cortisol because it's stressful. It helps you deal with stress. You're secreting adrenaline. You're secreting a lots of different hormones. They help you get through that every three minute surge that you feel. OK. So if you take that away and you don't feel anything, great, now you don't feel anything.
But here's the thing, you have a passenger, you have a partner in this whole thing. And nature has designed a system. It's a beautiful Symphony that's going on between mother and baby for nine months of passing things back and forth. You know, maybe not verbal communication. I mean, mom may be singing to her baby, but baby's not singing back.
But, but there's, there is a hormonal communication and biochemical communication and probably electrochemical communication, things we don't even understand auras and things like that that are going on between mother and baby who are In Sync. This, this beautiful thing is growing inside her body. She's communicating with it. And then suddenly labor starts, whether it's induced or whether
it starts on its own. And the baby's world is rocked because for nine months, the baby's been happy as a clam, living inside a little ball, floating around, talking to mom, doing its thing and, and, and all of a sudden now its will world is tightening every 3 minutes. And maybe as it starts to descend its butt or its head is starting to get squeezed and that's a little uncomfortable.
Or maybe the water breaks and now it's really getting squeezed and it's having to go through a small tunnel, right? Well, if mom is in communication with that baby by sending that baby endorphins and oxytocin. And maybe some adrenaline and cortisol every 3 minutes, a little waft if it gets to the baby and the baby goes all right, I'm feeling better because I'm getting, I'm feeling oxytocin, I'm feeling loved.
And I'm getting moms endorphins. That's, you know, that's like using some fentanyl, only it's safer. OK. And his baby's getting all these things and it's, and it feels like it's comfortable. And I, I use the term it, it, it's aware that mom is there. There's mom. I'm feeling OK, I'm safe now. You give the mom an epidural. She no longer feels any pain. The baby is still feeling pain. All right. Maybe the contractions even space out a little bit.
So then they start artificial oxytocin like Syntosin or Pitocin or whatever you call it in South Africa or Europe. Europe, I think it's Syntosin. And so now the contractions might even be closer together than they would have been naturally. And they're strong. And there's no mom to communicate to the baby that it's OK. And so then the baby begins to see, you begin to get stressed out and you get to see that on
the fetal heart rate tracing. And you see the baby's heart rate rising or you start to see decelerations. What they call a category 2 tracing and a category 2 tracing makes doctors nervous. And So what do doctors do? They say your baby's not tolerating labor. I think we should need to do AC section. Every time. What's that? Every time. Yeah, well it's the number one reason for C sections now. It used to be a rest of dilatation or the rest of dissent.
Now it it and or fetal distress. It's not even fetal distress anymore because they don't even know what a category 2 tracing means. It just means they're the doctor's uncomfortable or the nurse is uncomfortable and they say, let's get this baby out and they get and they do AC section and the baby comes out with good Apgar scores.
And then they think they saved the baby when what all they did was they caused this baby to be in an unnatural situation outside of communication with its mother and interrupting hundreds of thousands of years of evolutionary design and thinking that, you know, we did a good thing. And then wanting to force that upon women who choose to try to do it a different way, like home birthing. So the point being is that labor is probably painful for a reason. And so don't look at it as pain.
Look at it as I mean, that's what hypno birthing is all about. That's what these other things that help you to decide orgasmic birth, to help you navigate down that path and think of it in a different way. And if you think of it as that every time you're having that uncomfortable feeling, and again, maybe I'm diminishing it
a little bit. Maybe it's really it could be really, really uncomfortable, but you're doing something good for your baby and maybe let that sink into your brain and you'll you'll you'll cope. I mean, if, if for instance, just recently, like I said, I had, I, I was telling you before we started, I had a brush fire that was 50 yards from my house
and the smoke was really thick. And if I'd had anybody in the house that I needed to get out, I would have gone right back in and gone and, and, and choked on the smoke and maybe could burn my skin to save my pets. If I had children. I'm, you know, they're, they're all grown up now. My grandchildren were here. I would have, I would have done anything I could have to save my children. So that's how mothers feel about their baby.
So if they think of it in a different way, if they start thinking of it and is that what this discomfort is doing is helping me help my baby to navigate this process, which nature designed. And it's so important for babies to navigate this process. There are fetal reflexes that the baby uses to work its way down the canal.
And when they don't have the opportunity to do that because they're ripped out by caesarean section, then those fetal reflexes sometimes don't integrate into into more childhood reflexes. And then babies have issues like ADHD and bed wetting. And we did a whole podcast on on fetal reflexes. So. I think we listened to it. It's all connected. It's all connected and the medicalized system doesn't understand that because all that matters to them is getting that
live baby out. But that's the point right there. That's right there. But but Doctor Stu, it's just about getting the baby out. Yeah, Jeremy, it is because if you have a baby, a healthy baby, what are you crying about? What are you so sad about? It's just one day in your life. Get over it. I mean, this is what this is what I'm. I'm not making this stuff up. These are in the letters that people write to me all the time. That why, why, why are you so upset? Your baby's healthy.
You're healthy. Yeah. Well, you know what now? I got a scarred uterus. I got to worry about all my other future babies. I didn't get the experience that I wanted. But to the medicalized birth system, how a woman gives birth doesn't matter to them, but it is one of the most important things in a woman's life. A woman will remember the birth of her child till the day she dies. She'll remember everything about it.
She may not even remember her kids name when you get there when she reached a certain point in life, but she will remember every moment of that birth. And then and then doctors will say, well, how you know it's not important how you gave birth. They don't know anything. These doctors, these are the
experts supposedly in my field. And I will tell you the word expert has lost all meaning like safe and effective has lost all meaning or like evidence based has lost all meaning or standard of care as as these things have no meaning anymore because the standard of care can be terrible. And who defines what the standard of care is? And evidence based birth is only as evidence based.
Evidence based medicine is only as good as the evidence that's in it. And if you have crappy scientific papers that are only looking for outcomes like neonatal death and neonatal morbidity, then then the evidence is crappy and they ignore evidence to the contrary. Like you said earlier, the home, they're telling you home birth is dangerous. Well, there's plenty of evidence
to say that that's not true. So if you're being going to be an ethical, honest physician and a woman's asking you a question about birthing, you should give them all the information and let them decide. You should not skew your counseling to funnel them down the path you want them to go. But that's right, there is another very important point. So thanks to you, my wife and I changed our whole strategy during during her pregnancy. So let me give you an example.
So after, after we had listened to your number of your podcast episodes, we went now I think it was about she was about 6 months pregnant, Stu, and we sat down with the Guyani and, and he said, look, your baby's head's looking a bit big.
I just want to point out that C-section might be, might be something to think about, not saying what you must do, but you know, think about it. When we left, she said to me, I want to change Ghani's because I think that he is going to fear me into a decision that I don't want to do when the time comes. And, and we, that's what she did. She, she changed Ghani's. She said, I can see what he's doing. He's trying to plant these ideas
in advance. And now knowing that she talks to friends of hers who are pregnant or have just had babies. And also, yeah, my, my baby's head was too big. We had to do AC section. And I'm thinking how is it possible? Well, I maybe they went to the French Bulldog School of Medicine, OK. But I mean, that's what you hear. And and then the other problem is hindsight. So no doctors going to come after the fact and say, well, you know what, we didn't
actually need to do AC section. No, they don't. They don't. And and and and now the baby's healthy and done. So we're like, OK, so let's just carry on. Yeah, the gaslighting and gaslighting is a term that's, you know, been overused lately. But but the gaslighting that goes on by these doctors is, is legion. It's it's, it's everywhere. It's, you know, again, they will skew their counselling to funnel
you down the path. You know, if you come in for your first visit, you're 35 years old, immediately they tell you, you got a problem because you're a geriatric pregnancy, right? They, they, they plant these seeds of doubt because that makes you easier to manipulate toward the end. And the truth is, and I will challenge any physician to sit on a stage with me for two hours in front of a live audience and say otherwise. They are all very scared of what they're doing and they've been
indoctrinated to fear birth. They've been indoctrinated to fear being sued. They they don't understand the mammalian amount. None of none of it because pretty much everything that I learned in residency program is not true, whether it comes to breeches or twins. But I wanted to talk before we even go off in a different tangent. I want to talk a little bit about the about the Doctor Who's who never thinks they did an
unnecessary caesarean section. These people have to actually believe that 70 to 80% of women in your country, in your, in that part of your, of your country cannot deliver a baby vaginally. And in order to convince yourself that within a generation or two, women's bodies have massively changed and with babies, heads have massively grown, you have to, you have to be a, a fan of fiction because it, it's not possible.
It doesn't make any sense to think that that's the case, that a woman would grow a baby inside of her. That would that would come out, that wouldn't come out. That's like the whole thing about viruses. Viruses don't want to kill the host. They want the host to be able to spread them someplace else. If women grew babies inside of them, that would kill them in labor. That wouldn't be a very smart, you know, evolutionary path to follow.
So here's the scary thing. I'm not a fan, and probably you aren't either of the World Health Organization. But the World Health Organization has said that when the C-section rate rises toward 10%, there is some benefit to that. But once it goes beyond 10%, there is no benefit to that. They don't go as far as saying there's detriment, but they say there's no benefit to AC section
rate in a population over 10%. So let's just say it should be 10% and let's just say it's 70% in your country. So let's figure this out for a second. Let me think about this for a second. So 60% of women are having C sections that are probably not beneficial to them, which we would be defined as unnecessary. So I don't know how many babies are born in your country every year, but you can do the math and figure that out.
But there's thousands and thousands if not 100,000 women every year who are bringing unnecessary major abdominal surgery and no one is complaining no insurance companies complaining they're paying for it or your government's paying for it. No, if there were unnecessary knee surgeries or or eye surgeries or gallbladder surgeries, yeah, people would be upset about that and the and whoever's paying for that would be would say that would start
denying those payments because you're doing unnecessary surgery. Yet nobody says anything about these unnecessary C sections. But here's the scary thing Jeremy, if 50, sixty, 80% of C sections being done are unnecessary, and they are right, they are, I can, you know, I could take the time and prove it if I knew your, your country stats, but they are unnecessary. But here's the question, who's
doing them? Because as you said, no doctor goes home at night to their spouse and says hey honey, guess what I did today? I did 2 unnecessary C sections. No, every C-section he does is unnecessary. That 7080% of them are unnecessary. So the only way to cope with that is something called cognitive dissonance. It has to be, you know, they have to find a rationale to to say that oh, the World Health Organization is wrong or I'm not doing the unnecessary ones.
That guy over there, That guy over there, he's doing the unnecessary ones. But what that guy over there saying, he's saying this guy over here is doing the unnecessary ones and nobody takes responsibility for it. And hundreds of thousands of women are having, are being butchered for no reason and being denied the experience of giving birth as nature design. And their babies are being altered for all time because they're not developing the reflexes that they're supposed to have.
They're not experiencing what nature had designed. Their, their microbiome is altered, their hormonal connection is altered, their bonding and breastfeeding are altered. Mothers postpartum depression rates are higher. All these things are being, it's a cascade. I mean, after they do a cascade of interventions, we have a cascade of problems that occur that no one is addressing or they're trying to address on the far end by oh that woman's depressed, let's give her a SSRI
medication. How about we don't get her depressed in the 1st place by letting her deliver vaginally? How about we go to what they call the root cause and let's let's solve the problem. Let's figure out why think our outcomes are so bad and do something different. But it's very lucrative for the people running the system. And most of the doctors now are not independent souls anymore. They are just hogs in a, you know, machinery. They're paid salaried employees working a shift.
Why do they care? We, so we ended up with a midwife at here at home and and what my wife said afterwards is that the midwife knows so much more than the gyne. Midwives do know more about normal birth. That is their expertise. The OBGY NS know more about problems and and sometimes they're really good at it. The problem is, is that they see everything as a problem.
The the American College of OBGYN, which is you have, you probably have your same organization in South Africa in one of their guidelines and probably more than one, but one I found specifically and it had it was just had to do with influenza in pregnancy, but they were talking and the abstract starts out with this sentence. Pregnancy itself is a high risk condition. Therefore influenza in pregnancy is potentially more more damaging or something to that
nature. But the first part of that sentence is pregnancy itself is a high risk condition. If that is the way that modern medicine sees pregnancy, that's the prism they're looking through, then it gives you a little understanding into the mentality of those that are teaching the next generation of doctors to do this thing. Pregnancy itself is a high risk condition, all right? If that's how they see it, that's how they treat it.
That and then it makes them nervous and scared and therefore they project that onto the women and it gets propagated and propagated and propagated. Pregnancy itself is a normal, normal bodily function. Occasionally it goes awry, but so does breathing. So does digestion. We we don't consider breathing or digestion to be a high risk condition. Unless you're running into a smoke filled house, then it might be.
But. But just for, just for clarity, you're not saying that there's no need for the hospital because it is there to serve a purpose, right? Of course, of course, the problem is the the financial problem is that if we took women out of the hospital that didn't need to be there, then hospitals wouldn't be able to keep their maternity wards open. And we need the maternity wards to be open because they do do miracles there. They do save people's lives there.
But as the World Health Organization and, and many other experts who I trust a lot more than them say maybe it's 10%, maybe 15% of the time a woman needs medical attention. Some things that they would need absolute medical attention would be if a woman has a placenta previa, that's not something you can be delivering at home without great risk to mother and babies lives. Some woman has severe
preeclampsia, right? That's something where the baby needs to be delivered because the women could suffer seizures and other metabolic problems or, or even die from that sort of thing. Those those are kind of things, not breech. I mean, that's a common 1 you often hear. Yeah, but my baby hasn't turned. Right. But breech is not a reason that you have to birth in the hospital.
As a matter of fact, breech is a reason to stay out of the hospital simply because nobody in the hospital generally knows what to do. So they will immediately go to a caesarean section for breech baby, even if the breech is beginning to come out of the vagina, the butt or the legs are sticking out of the vagina. They'll panic.
They don't know what to do. You know, there's a documentary that people can look at called Heads Up, The Disappearing Art of Breech Delivery. And in that documentary, there's an actress named Miranda Bakarin, and she's in the TV series Homeland. And she was in what's that superhero movie with Ryan Reynolds where he's wearing the red suit. What's that called? Deadpool. Deadpool. Yeah. She's so people know who she is.
And she had a breech baby. And she talks about the fact that when because she had a practitioner in a hospital where they did breach deliveries, when she came into the hospital, she said, I came in the hospital, my membranes were ruptured. I'm breached. There's meconium. That would freak out 95% of hospitals in the world. But what, what she was greeted with was, oh, so you must be with Doctor Wu, we'll call him. Let's get you settled in, blah,
blah, blah. Because that was a hospital that's familiar with breach delivery. Most of the other hospitals would be panicked and they couldn't get you under general anesthesia fast enough to get that baby out by caesarean section. Breech is not a indicate not an indication to be in the hospital. If a hospital has a great service and has great people there, fine. But hospitals are not going to offer you a vaginal breech delivery in a Safeway of doing it.
Breech delivery should be done in upright positioning most often. Most hospitals don't know how to deliver a baby if you're not on your back with your legs up in stirrups. They don't understand the Physiology, they don't understand the mechanisms, they don't know what they're what they're doing. So you're more likely to have a problem if you have a breech delivery in the hospital than if you have it at home, right?
If there's a real problem, yes, theoretically you could, you know, then you could be closer to an operating room where they might be able to do something. But at what cost? At what cost are we sectioning all breeches when really, you know, you're saving about one in every thousand babies over a vaginal delivery of a head down baby and that those numbers are from the Royal College of OBGYN's Green top guidelines from 2017 if people want to look them up.
So you're sectioning 1000 women to save one baby. Now, if that's your baby, that makes OK, fine. But. What are we doing to the other 999 women? We're putting them, their baby and their future babies at greater risk than we did if we would have let that woman deliver vaginally with a breech baby. They don't understand that because they're they're taught to fear breach. More than more than 98% of breaches worldwide are delivered
by caesarean section. In in our practice, I think we had a 7% C-section rate and 75% of twins worldwide are delivered by caesarean section and our practice. Our C-section rate for twins was 8.7%. Sure. What did? We do differently, we just trusted nature's design and I was lucky that I trained in an era where the skills were just considered a very part of normal teaching. Breach and twin skills was was normal when I was a resident in early 1980s. Now it's not taught anymore.
It's rare that a resident goes through a residency program, you know, not even not seeing a breach, let alone even possibly doing a breach that's so unlikely to happen. And that's, that's a shame. That's, that should be a shame and a stain on medical doctors who are training the future generations of doctors. Because one out of every 20 women who walk into your office who are pregnant will have a
breech baby. And so you're an expert in pregnancy and you don't know how to take care of one out of every 20 women that walk into your office. How embarrassing is that, let alone just bad? When we walked away from the from the from the OBGYN, my wife said to me, did you notice how much he spoke about being sued? Yeah, well, if if that, if your doctor talks like that, you did the right thing. The first thing you do is is find a new find a new practitioner.
And I would recommend that even if you plan to deliver in the hospital with an obstetrician that you get some of your prenatal care with a midwife. And again, be careful about choosing your midwives because some midwives are becoming very medicalized as well. So it's not just the title that makes a difference. It's it's how they practice because the title midwife is being Co opted by the medical cartel as well. But you're. Right, my point was, my point was protocol.
Yeah, the protocol. Is is is dominating everything now? Yes, the medical model works on on algorithms, and if you deviate from the algorithm, you're more likely to get sued. This is a terrible way to live. It's a terrible way to practice. One of the things I feel for my OB colleagues, I mean, they have to take a a major part of the responsibility because they've let it happen. So you can't absolve them of all responsibility. But I feel for them because they live in a world where they're
under threat all the time. Yeah, something goes wrong. Then they get. We know it will, we know it will that always, something always will go wrong. And then the idea that your career could end on a bad outcome is a terrible way to live. And, and I don't think that most of my most obstetricians that are practicing these days knew that when they went into medical school or residency and chose that as a field. I think they really chose it to do good because it's a very
joyous form of medicine. But how many of your obstetricians actually act like they're feeling joyous? Not very many. They act sort of stressed. They're stressed out and it's a horrible way to live. And, and how do I know that? Well, because happy people don't treat people badly. Happy people don't say to people, I think the baby's head's too big. I think that you know you you choosing a vaginal is probably a bad idea. Or you've got narrow hips.
You've got narrow hips or, you know, or just even being condescending to them. I mean, why is it so important for you to have a vaginal delivery or, you know, we all want to, we all want to have the birth that we want, but you know, at least we'll have a healthy baby, Happy, healthy people don't talk to other people like that. So something has happened psychologically to my
profession. They've been under a sort of a mass formation where they've given up their individuality to be part of the collective just to keep their head down and collect their paycheck. And it's, it's a horrible thing. And that's, that's why I'm always nervous when I hear that hospitals are bringing in midwives or bringing in doulas. Doulas are like non medical birth assistants because if the hospital's bringing them in, that means they're being paid by
the hospital. If you're paid by the hospital, who is your loyalty to? Who's your fiduciary duty to? And the answer is it's conflicted. Now, when you're a private doula or private midwife or even a private OB, you could be loyal to the patient. You may have to answer to the medical board, but your loyalty
is to the patient. But when you work for a hospital system and say the hospital system says we don't do breech babies here, but you just took a seminar, they found out how easy breech is to do and you want it. And the woman one has a breech baby. You can't tell her that because if you tell her how easy it is to do a breech delivery and how safe it really is, you might get fired.
So you're, you're right there, there these medical legal concerns, these these conflicts of interest, they weigh heavily on the system. And the person who suffers from it is the patient. Can I read you? I've got a very long e-mail, so I'll just I'll summarize it, but I want to read an e-mail that I received and I actually might forward forward this to you because it relates to you. It's probably just like my inbox every day.
Go ahead. But so she says, yeah, with the help of your podcast with Doctor Stew and Doctor Stew's podcast and a class that I took called Pain Free Birth in Brackets. She's a doula who teaches about natural childbirth. I was able to give birth at home unexpectedly and by myself. I'm from the US but I'm living in the UAE where home birth is illegal and I was planning on giving birth in a hospital with midwives. My contractions started early in the morning, exactly on my due date.
I went about my day, blah blah blah. She explains her day and she says during a contraction my water broke and everything ramped up from there. The baby was born 30 minutes later. Nothing I did in those thirty minutes gave me relief. I tried sitting in the tub. I was immediately uncomfortable so I told my husband to run the shower. I stood in the shower letting the waterfall on my back and I tried my best not to tense my mouth, face or any part of my
body and to just breathe. And she says I And then I started crowning. My husband walked away for a moment to try and reach the doula, who was also a trained midwife and she was on her way. I pushed once more and the baby came out. Well, thank you for thank you for reading that story. I mean, the a couple things stand out to me. The fact that home birth is illegal, it's like, yeah, that one, that one jumps out at me. I wonder, did she get arrested? I mean, what happened to her?
Do we know? I can always e-mail and ask her. No, I'd be curious to see what happened. There's so many stories I could I could share with you. I, I hear stories all the time. Maybe you do 2 of they call human interest stories. They're on the news at night where a woman delivers on the side of the road and maybe a passerby or helps her have her baby in the back seat. And then they show her, of course, then what they do with her is they take her to the hospital, right?
The baby's already out. Placenta's out. Why are we going to the hospital? But that's, that's what they that's what they do because it's culturally that's what people think they they need. They need to do that. But the story begins earlier than that when she called her doctor and it's her third baby and he doctor and she says, my contractions are right on top of each other. And the doctor says, OK, come to the hospital. What the doctor should have said
is, wow, that's great. Just hang tight. I'll be right over. Why are you making a woman who's contracting like crazy get in a car and drive someplace? You would never do that again. Gets back to the mammalian birth model. You, you would never do that. Your dog's in labor. It's booming labor. You pick your dog up, you put it in the car, you strap it into a car seat and you drive to the local vet station.
No, you would never do that. So the idea that that we we interfere and that when you leave it alone, this is sort of what happens. And it's not always is as easy, it doesn't always go smoothly. Clearly nothing I'm saying is 100%, but most births, if you just leave them alone and if you have the confidence and trust in the right mindset, then birth
will progress as nature design. And this woman's story is great because I'm sure that had she tried to rush to the hospital, there would have been a panic when she got there because the baby's head would have been coming out and nobody would have helped her. They would have all been screaming up the chain of command for who's you know who's
going to help her. And nobody would have just stopped and been human and just looked at her in the eyes and got her eye contact and said, look at me, you're fine. Everything's going to be fine. Let's get this baby out. Great. They just and and and and talk to her like that as opposed to acting panicked. It's almost as it's a virtue signaling you have to the more panicked you are, the more you obviously care.
It's it's the opposite, but. But when we when, so when my wife was pregnant, we went for hypno birthing classes. And for those who don't know what hypno birthing is, Stuart's, it's basically just a way of thinking. It's just changing your mindset. That's all it is. It's not hypnosis or anything. Woo, woo. And she, she was telling us that the whole point of not being stressed or nervous or scared is that those responses are, are
flight responses. And so therefore those will lengthen the labour because, because you need to get out of that situation. And so the baby can't come yet. And, and so and, and, but, but that's what the whole thing is about. Then then that's when the hospitals come in and say, but don't worry, we're there for you. And and so the whole thing becomes inverted. Well, it does.
Pretty much everything they do to you when you show up at the hospital is antithetical to the what I've decided what I've described as nature's design, right when you interrupt A mammal, all right, they put out adrenaline. I said this earlier. Adrenaline caused the contractions to space apart or even stop.
So when you're questioning a woman, you're asking her about how many stairs she has in her house or you know, what did grandma die from or what, what birth control are you going to be using after you have this baby? Like like that matters at this point in time. No, it doesn't matter. But it's on the questionnaire and we have to ask the questions in order to move on to page 2 so we can get you admitted. This is this again, it's all automated. It's all algorithmic.
When you go to the hospital, they want to put you on a monitor. They want to have you change into a hospital gown. What does a hospital gown signify? That you're a patient, That you're, that you're I'll why are you going to the? It's the only thing we go to the hospital for, Jeremy that is for a normal bodily function. Pretty much there isn't anything else we go to a hospital for other than that as a normal bodily function. You have to pee in a cup.
They have to draw blood on you. They, they, again, like I said, they take your blood pressure. They do all these things to you and then suddenly that you're on the monitor and your contractions are 8 minutes apart when they were 3 minutes apart and they can't figure that out. But you and I could because we just took a mammal and we interrupted them and we scared them and suddenly their contractions spaced apart. That is basic mammalian Physiology, yet they don't
understand that. But now you're there at the hospital and they say, well, your contract is based out you're here. You're you know, you're almost 40 weeks. Why don't we just rupture your membranes or why don't we just start, you know, augment augmenting your labor? No, no, no, I'm not in good labor. I'm going home. Just go home. Don't you know? That's why hiring a doula and staying home.
And if even if you want a hospital birth, don't show up at the hospital till you're like ready to push. There's far less chance that they can do something to screw it up than if you show up when you're 2 to 3 centimeters dilated and you're getting unnecessary vaginal exams. And they're going to put you in the bed and they're going to put those belts on you and they're going to interrupt you
constantly. And they're going to put a blood pressure cuff on your arm that every hour it's going to pump up in the middle of a contraction. And, and they're going to come in and come asking you questions and the lights are going to be on and, and you're going to hear noises in the hallway, right? And you have to ask permission to go to the bathroom because you're plugged into this machine and the nurse has to come in and hook. And how undignifying is that?
Everything that they do to you, again, is not evidence based. It is convenience for the hospital. It makes it easier or generates revenue or, you know, does things for the hospital's sake. None of that for your mother, because when you go to a home birth, as we said earlier, you never find the woman in a bed. You never start an IV automatically. You never draw blood.
You may take your blood pressure one time when you show up, and if it's normal, you probably won't take it again unless she has some symptoms that tell you it might be reasonable to take a blood pressure. You don't have to do it every 30 minutes or every hour simply because that's what the protocol at the hospital says. They don't understand that you're interrupting her. Leave her alone.
You know, there was a, there was a thing that came out a while ago that they want to make hospitals more home like because they were worried about competing with hospital with home birthing. So in the administrator's mind, that kind of mind, what do they think that means? It means nice hardwood floors and some nice curtains. It doesn't mean changing the policies and leaving the woman alone and letting her get in a tub or a shower if she wants to.
And not being monitored all the time doesn't mean any of those things. So stay out of the hospital. If people have watched The Business of Being Born, I don't know if you and your wife ever watched. That movie, What's her? What's her name? The the the presenter, the show host. Ricki Lake and Abby Epstein. Yes, Ricki Lake. Yeah, there's a scene in there where a mentor of mine, I never got the chance to meet him, he's passed away now, named Mars and
Wagner, very bright guy. And he gives a monologue about how in the 50s they X-rayed all all these women, They X-rayed their pelvises to see if they were pelvises were big enough. And they found it caused cancer in the children. So they stopped doing that. And then they gave out
thalidomide. Thalidomide was a thing that was supposed to be for hyperemesis, which was too much throwing up and nausea caused babies in in England mainly to have limb reduction defects where they had, you know, abnormal limbs. And then they tried Cytotec for inducing laborers in women that had previous cesarean sections. And they had a lot of ruptured uteruses and a lot of babies died.
So he summarizes the whole little scene by saying, if you want the best birth possible, if you want to, you know, have a healthy baby, stay the hell out of the hospital, is what he says. And he's right. He's right. If you're a perfectly healthy woman, you should stay the hell out of the hospital. And you should get over your fear because your fear is leading you down a path where you're going to have a 70%
C-section rate in your country. But now, OK, so Stu, I have to bring this up because I've had this, this conversational arc many times with, with, with different people over the last year and a half or so. And this always comes up. But well, look at the data. A child mortality went down once, once childbirth went into the hospital. And we and they have showed the industrial revolution stats and
all that sort of thing. Well, you can if you want to compare it to 100 years ago, that's true. But 100 years ago, we didn't know germ theory, we didn't have antibiotics, we didn't have clean water and plumbing and things like we have now. All right, stop that comparison. Compare it to 50 years ago. Compare it to 1970. The C-section in rate in your country in 1970 was probably about 6%. How have the outcomes been since 1970 for your babies and your mother's?
And you will find, again, I don't know your country stats, but I know my country stats, you will find that the neonatal morbidity and mortality rate has not significantly changed. The rate of cerebral palsy has not diminished.
The rate of hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy, which is brain damaged babies, has not diminished despite the C-section rate going up 600% in my country, despite continuous fetal monitoring which was supposed to tell us which babies were at risk and therefore we were going to be able to save those babies. Again. These things were all put in place without ever seeing whether they work first. This is like thalidomide or like
doing X-rays on women. These are all what are called stage 1 thinking we're going to do something without actually testing to see if it's safe. Now we live in a world where we're giving pregnant women 6 vaccines while they're pregnant. Yes my wife was. She was told to to get a flu shot whilst was pregnant and she said no. Yeah, flu Dtap, which is diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis, COVID shot and now they want to give you a respiratory syncytial virus shot.
None of which, by the way, none of which have ever been tested for safety in a randomized, controlled, placebo-controlled trial in anybody, let alone pregnant women, and none of which have been tested giving him at the same time. Five of these vaccines are recommended at 28 weeks. Who does this kind of stuff? Who? Why would you trust anybody who tells you to do that? Who tells you as a pregnant woman? Who tells you not to eat sushi? Yes. But you can get 5 vaccines while you're pregnant.
Don't trust these people, they don't know anything. I was one of them. I was that person who would have told you those things back when, in the late eight 1980s when I came out of my residency, until I was influenced by the midwifery model of care and the midwives in my community. And that was an incidental accident. They asked me to take their transfers from home when I first came into practice and I did it because I wanted to make money.
I didn't do it because I thought I wanted to help midwives or I wanted to help home birth people. I thought home birth was probably stupid. I don't really remember, but I'm sure that I that's how I was trained. So I did it because I wanted to make money. I did it for the wrong reason, but it led me down this path. It took a long, it took many years to undo the training that I had, but here we are.
So something you said to me last year is, and it's difficult to prove these things and and you hinted at it now in this conversation, but a baby that goes through the birth canal versus a baby that's AC section. Could have different outcomes health wise later on, for example, attention issues and and and other and other things that are very difficult to pinpoint. But it's, it's, it's plausible,
isn't it? Yes, again, it's not every baby that comes out through the vagina is going to be healthier than every baby that's born by cesarean section. That's not how statistics work. You know, every individual case is different, but overall following nature's design, it's just like, it's just like with viruses. You're better off catching the virus and getting better than getting a vaccine. You're better off following
nature's design. And, and when you're born vaginally through a, through a normal labor process and you colonize with the normal bacteria, getting a good auto transfusion of your own blood and stem cells with delayed or would call optimal cord clamping or it's actually no cord clamping. I mean, in the, in the midwifery model, we generally don't clamp the cord at all till the placenta is out and in a bowl and maybe an hour later because we don't want to disturb that first hour.
We leave the baby attached to what it's always been attached to. And then eventually we cut the cord just to get the placenta off the field. But, but when you, when you do those sorts of things, you don't, you don't mess with Mother Nature's design and you end up with generally healthier kids. We know that babies born by C-section have a slightly greater risk of childhood asthma. They have a slightly greater risk of, of diabetes. They have a slightly greater risk of eczema and other
autoimmune disorders. We know that for a fact. We know that they that they have a higher rate of not integrating their reflexes, right? Not all babies, some babies do great. So we can't really tell who's going to do it. But we know that nature's design is the best way to go for most women because it because nature designed it over eons. And nature isn't stupid. You know, there was an obstetrician, I think his name is Errol Norwich and I, he should be forever ridiculed.
He was in a fake debate with a guy named Charles Lockwood and they were talking about whether or not it was OK to induce all women at 39 weeks, which would which two years later would come out as the arrive trial, which you may have heard if you're in your country where they think it's great to meddle with Mother Nature every time at 30, you know, at 39 weeks, all babies should be born in 39 weeks because again, all that matters
is a live baby in the bassinet. That's again that perfect theory about that. But in this debate, which was a fake debate, because the debate usually is between two people that have different points of view. Turns out these big, big guys both have the same point of view and and they faked it. One pretended to have a different point of view, but by the end they were both in agreement that 39 week induction was a good idea.
And this doctor Norwich said something that I, that I still think was one of the stupidest things I've ever said. Unfortunately, the audience laughed and he said that nature is a lousy obstetrician. And the and the audience laughed because they weren't thinking. And I would say, thank God nature's a lousy obstetrician because obstetricians are doing lousy. Obstetricians aren't doing well. He's so proud of the job that they're doing. And then just look at where our outcomes are now.
Look at your country. Look at our chronic illness rate in children. Look at our postpartum depression rate. Look at our C-section rate. Look at our induction rate. The rate of NICU admissions in my country in the last 15 years has doubled. Now, is that because we're doing badly and having bad babies? Or is that because it's very lucrative to find ways to get babies to go to the NICU? I don't know. But either one of them is evil. Does that make sense?
The the rate of NICU admissions has doubled. So either we're doing something wrong with all this mighty medicine because it's not doubling because 1% of babies are being born at home. That math doesn't fan out. It's doubling because we're screwing up in the hospital or we're not screwing up in the hospital.
But the hospital, in order to make money, is finding new policies and new and new new ways to mandate that that this baby, because it was born to this mother, has to be observed in the NICU for a little while because NICU is big money for hospitals. You know our our OBGYN, I say ow as if it's as if I had any role. My wife's OBGYN, shall I say it's. Yours right? You're you're there. He made a very dark statement and he wasn't trying to be cynical or anything, but he, it
was just very dark, he said. You know, I think in about 100 years time there will be no natural births. I've heard that from Brazilian doctors as well. I think that I think there's, I think he's wrong. I think the pendulum has swung about as far as it's going to swing. And the reason I feel that way is because what the medical cartel is doing now is so
desperate. It's very typical at the, you know, at at the end of the, of the life of something that they cling to their model and push back even harder. And there are states now, like I just spoke with somebody in Norway yesterday. I did a podcast in Norway and they're trying to ban free birth in Norway. The medicalized birth model is lobbying the politicians in Oslo to make free birth illegal because free birth is on the
rise. Free birthing is just basically giving birth without anybody around you. Yeah, without any any medical professional, usually not even your partner, but yeah, but just you at home. So but free birth is on the rise in in Norway. So you and I would ask because we're inquisitive, we would ask the question, well, why is free birth on the rise? And if you answer the, if you ask the women who are doing free birth, they say because we don't want to go to the hospital
because the hospitals suck. They don't say it that way, but I'm, I'm paraphrasing there. So what do the hospitals do with that information? Well, instead of saying, God, we suck, we should try to fix what what's happening. No, they try to quash people from having a choice of birthing outside of the hospital, and they'll do it, Jeremy, in the name of safety. It's not safe to have a free
birth. But I don't know that they know what they're talking about and how they define safety because it's clearly not safe to go to a hospital that has a 40 or 50%
C-section rate. It's not safe for mom, it's not safe for baby, and it's not safe for mom's future babies to have that kind of thing in Norway. So this is the kind of tyranny that's going on. Instead of them looking in the mirror at themselves and saying, you know, we're forcing women to choose something that we think is dangerous. They don't, but we think it's dangerous. Maybe we ought to look at ourselves. Why are women choosing something that we think is dangerous?
What are we doing that's causing that? But no, they don't have any introspection like that. They immediately wanted to just use use the the mighty fist to hammer and make it illegal for these women to to choose to birth at home. We were talking about our circle of friends who've had babies and we got up to the number 10 before we reached first natural birth. Yeah, it's frightening to me because we are changing the species. We're changing the species.
There is such a thing as epigenetics and will Our young females who are not exposed to mom's oxytocin and labour who are are not born vaginally, will they in the future have more difficult times having vaginal bursts? Michelle O'dant, who's in his 80s now, very bright gentleman. Some of you know him because he was also in the business of being born. He's the Frenchman who they use subtitles on because his accent is so thick.
He believes that the by the pre labor caesarean section, the cesarean section that's scheduled electively before labor starts, those female fetuses are never and males too in their brain, but they're never exposed to mom's oxytocin. They're never exposed to this love hormone, this bonding hormone and that maybe that, that, that their little uteruses in, in the fetus will not develop oxytocin receptors to
the same extent. And then they'll have more trouble contracting when they grow up and they try to have a baby. There's also some question of whether or not you, you, you know, the, the rates of autism and, and you know, autism, autism spectral disorders where you, the failure to connect, the failure to make eye contact, the failure to do things may have to do with how we give birth as
well. There's lots of so many other environmental factors that may cause autism, but you don't see autism in people born vaginally who haven't been vaccinated, who aren't eating processed foods. You just don't, you don't, you don't see that. It's extremely rare in in our country. Here we have what's called the Amish population. They're people that live by a traditional way of life. They're ahead of the curve.
They are ahead of the curve. They eat healthy food, they don't use modern medicine, they don't take medications, they don't get vaccinated. And for the most part, and the kids play in the dirt like your like your little baby was crawling around in the grass and getting a rash. It's great for them, makes them stronger. You don't see these sorts of diseases in that people.
And then you have people like authors like Andy Wakefield and Paul Thomas and now and now my friend Joe Walsh, we're putting out books that basically say that the unvaccinated kids are healthier in every aspect than the vaccinated kids. And I would argue that babies born vaginally as a trend, not always, but as a trend are going to be healthier than babies born by caesarean section. Can I prove that? No, I can't necessarily prove that.
But because no one's really studying to look at it, the funding for studies in my country doesn't go to people looking to undermine the, the ideology or the, or the way things are done because they don't want to know. So research and funding for research is corrupted completely too, by the same big medical cartel that is profiting greatly off of the lousy outcomes we have in obstetrics. I'm just looking at looking at the time.
You and I could talk. We looked at I can't wait to come to South Africa and hang out. No, just just hang out with you. No, listen, this, this, I can talk for hours on this because it, it, this isn't just a conversation that's academics to you. This, this literally affected my life and my wife's life and the life of my child that that came into the world. It's very significant more than anything else just about. And I've got a very, very healthy child.
And it just blows my mind that if I think about the kids in baby class that are his age, they're all sick and they've still got marks on their arms from, from the from the vaccines and they're constantly going in and out of clinics because they're, they're getting sick. And my little boy has not been sick and he's healthy. And it's just, it's just, it seems like such a no brainer. Right and and those parents will be fearful of your unvaccinated kid.
Yes. Yeah, their kids are vaccinated and that's supposed to protect them from the diseases that your kid might catch, which will make your kids stronger. But if the vaccine works so well, then why are they fearful of your kid? But I do have to ask the question Jeremy, why is your 8 month old baby in class already? Let's flip that all the notes. No, it's no, no, no. It's just, it's just a, a, a group of moms with their babies getting together. Yes.
Yes, he said class. And it's like, wait a minute, I didn't know they had classes for babies. No, no, no, no, months old. And once a month. It's a genius. Yes, he's he's the head boy. And then once a once a month, it's it's dad's turn. To go to the to the, to go to the class. Oh, OK. Yeah, it's baby. Wait, wait till they get to be like 1 1/2 and two. And you take them to the playground and they're playing
with running around. They're running through the sprinklers and running down the slides and stuff like that. My granddaughter just is about to turn 2 and I just, she's in Louisiana and I just, I get to see her. I go down there like several times a year and I just totally in love. You know, that's the beauty of having children because they get grandchildren eventually. You hope anyway. All right, Doctor Stu, how can I follow your work? Well, everything is birthing
instincts. So my website isbirthinginstincts.com and my podcast is Birthing Instincts podcast. We have a Patreon group. We're over 1000 people now in our group. We have different tiers, but every month we hold a peer review. For birth workers, we hold AQ and A once a month Bliss holds a what's called a village prenatal. She was. On my show too. Oh, you've had bliss. Kim. Kim. Yeah. Oh, no, not Kim. No, I said. Bliss. Oh OK, sorry, wrong person. Oh, oh, you said You might.
You thought I said Kim Biss. Yes, yes. No no Bliss is my Co host on my podcast. Oh, sorry, sorry. Oh, Kim Biss is amazing. Yeah, she's amazing. Sad because she's finding all these things with, with menstrual periods and miscarriages and all that other stuff that she's finding. Yes, but no, but that's how they find me. If you wanted to join our Patreon group, we'd love to have you. It's, you know, it's behind the paywall. So we can say anything we want.
And there are different tiers. As I said, there are different tiers. And if the higher tiers you get to come and you get time with me and bliss, that sort of thing. I'm missing something. But people, people will can find it. Everything's on my website. All the links to everything that I do is on my website. Oh, I've I've I've written a book called Fearless Pregnancy. It's right here, but it's old. You have to send that to me a signed copy. Yeah, it's, it's old.
The last issue came out in 2010, some of us, and I wrote it. So I wrote it before I was doing home birthing. I wrote it when I was working as a collaborative Dr. with a midwife. And some of the stuff is still very relevant. I like to read it because I think how differently I am now 15 years later. And of course, the genetics chapter is completely obsolete because this was before the advent of like a non invasive prenatal screening, the blood test type stuff.
But it's still, you know, something that I love. And I've got I've written 4 papers, one on home birthing, one on breech home birthing, one on twin home birthing. And then a case report about twins with entangled heads. A breech first twin. That's fear. That's everyone's biggest fear. And then why doctors won't allow women to have a, a vaginal delivery of twin A is breech. But that also is again, misguided to say the least. It's very rare. The literature doesn't support
that. But there's this picture that everybody sees and that scares the bejeebers out of everybody. And I, I had it happened to me once and I was able to just manage it because of my skill as being a breach practitioner and knowing with through hands on experience what you can do when you have a situation where something is stuck. And just to simply the answer is you just reduce station, you push things back up until because the pelvis is shaped
like this. And if you push things back up, you've got more room to move things around. But what will happen in a panic in a hospital setting with somebody who doesn't know anything is they'll start pulling on that baby. And then that's going to just lead to a really bad outcome because they don't do this training anymore. Sorry.
No, no, I was going to say I'm, I will echo listening to your podcast because your podcast is, is what played a major, major role in, in our in in the changing direction that that we had. So I would strongly recommend listening to to your podcast. On that note, Doctor Stu, thank you for joining me. One more thing. I forgot I do teach, I do teach 2 day seminars on breach and twin skills and again you can find that on the website.
This is my passion right now. I'm sort of done with clinical work because I, I, I don't want to really be on call anymore. I did it for 40 years. It was hard, but I travel around the world and I would love to come to South Africa and I would love to be able to teach a class where it's two days. We talk about twins and breeches and why things are the way they are. And then we spend hours on Sophie and her mom simulators, learning the skills of breech
and twin delivery. So I'm sorry to interrupt your you know, go ahead, do it. Again. Good. OK, well, let's do the outro again. Doctor Stew, thank you for joining me in the changes. You're welcome, Jeremy. It's been a pleasure.