Postpartum Self-care.
There are many strategies to help your body recover from pregnancy and childbirth, and restore it to it’s pre-pregnancy state. In modern American society, women have become conditioned to accept many chronic postpartum conditions as inevitable side-effects of childbearing. In this video, learn one simple strategy you can do at home to help your pelvis come back in line again, giving support to your pelvic floor, preventing issues pertaining to the hips, pelvic floor (such as incontinence and uterine prolapse, etc.) and lower back.
The state of postpartum care in the US
American women are in need of better postpartum care, education and support. It is a blissful and uniquely special time of life, yet full of complexities, stress, a steep learning curve and a lot of frustration. However postpartum care is minimal and surveillance of maternal health postpartum is lacking. It has also become common to live far away from our families, and therefore we tend not to be as close with our female family members who could otherwise be there to guide us and help us. The US National Maternal and Infant Health Survey in 1988 showed that “poor maternal physical health was related to children’s reduced general physical health, frequent tantrums and difficulty playing with other children, as well as mothers’ feeling of difficulties in managing children’s behaviors at 3 years of age.” In Chinese medicine there is a saying “treat the mother to treat the child,” highlighting the rather common sense but much overlooked need for mothers to be in a good state of health and well cared for in order to care for and raise healthy children. In the philosophy of Chinese medicine, the time immediately following childbirth for a woman is considered a crucial time to restore and preserve her long-term health. A study in Australia which began in 1981 found that women who experienced problems during pregnancy were 4 times as likely to develop depression and 8 times as likely to report health problems 14 years postpartum.