An Unexpected Home Birth Advocate
Posted by realityrounds on February 28, 2010
Dr. Happy and his mullet says "hell yeah" to homebirth.
Who would have thunk it? The Happy Hospitalist just published a post defending home births: Home Birthing Experience Should Not Turn Women and Midwives Into Criminals.
For those who are not familiar, “Dr. Happy” is an internal medicine hospitalist who has very strong (and sometimes bizarre) opinions on many areas of health care. For instance, he has been known to defend Michael Jackson’s doctor for setting up a Dr. Frankenstein’s lab in his home, and often accuses nurses of not having critical thinking skills.
Thus, I was presently surprised to see Dr. Happy defending home birth based on scientific and common sense evidence. Thank you Dr. Happy (that is until you write the next obnoxious post degrading advanced practice and staff nurses), for spreading some common sense.
RR
midwest woman said
LOL did thiis hurt to do this post since I know you’re such a “fan”?
The Happy Hospitalist said
First of all, you could learn a lot by reading my blog (and you do know that picture ain’t real, right?) As for your misinformation, I didn’t defend Dr Conrad Murray. I think what he did was an astronomically idiotic thing to do. My position is that bad medical decision making does not rise to the level of homicide criminal charges, whether it’s Michael Jackson or a homeless guy. Secondly, nurses who call me to tell me that my patient screened positive for sepsis, when my admitting diagnosis was sepsis, lack critical thinking skills. Don’t get mad at me for pointing out lack of critical thinking skills, or even common sense in some nurses. Get mad at your profession for not training some nurses with the ability to rationalize decision making. These are patients they are taking care of. They shouldn’t be within a ten foot radius of patients if they can’t think critically about patient issues.
As for midwives, they offer an excellent alternative to the medicalization of a natural process in low risk populations. Which is far different from nurse practitioners who claim to practice independently with a similar scope and practice, undifferentiated from internists and family medicine physicians. They can’t. Their training is vastly inferior, light years apart. But the public has no idea they can’t. That’s like a midwife claiming to offer high risk OB care to a public who has no idea they aren’t trained to do that. They simply aren’t trained for it.
pinky said
Nurses are taught critical thinking skills. Then the hospital writes guidelines and policies that ban them from using them. Most hospitals will make way too many policies.
realityrounds said
Lighten up Happy! Yes I used my critical thinking skills to determine that your picture is not real.
Allison said
Well, now. lets consider your sepsis call. As a sometime hospital nurse (now happily in home health where I promise you we cannot function without those critical thinking skills) I wonder if you are not oversimplifying that sepsis phone call just a bit. Would I be surprised that a patient diagnosed with sepsis might have a positive blood culture (this is what I assume you are talking about)? No, of course not. But I can think of 2 reasons I might call you anyway. on is as pinky said that I may be required to call you by hospital policy. This is often ridiculous. I recall being required to tell nephrologists that their dialysis patients had critical high creatinine. The response was generally an eye roll and yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course I generally did this in person when they rounded.
The second reason I might call you about the sepsis is that many hospitalists I know expect a phone call when a specific organism is identified so that we can check if the patient is indeed on the right mix of antibiotics or whether we can discontinue any ( i.e. vanco). I realize these calls are annoying of you don’t intend to make changes but they are also my job.
So please consider that we are not all idiots despite the fact that we may annoy you.
Jill said
I just unsubscribed from HH’s feed last week. Funny coincidence. Perhaps I’ll resubscribe…
WWWebb said
This is like Dahmer complimenting you on your menu.