Welcome to Natural MD Radio, your place to hear the whole truth on health and medicine for women and children and get the tools you need to take back your health naturally starting now. I'm Dr. Aviva Rong. Did you know that red raspberry leaf herb taken as a tea in the last trimester

has been shown to reduce pain and length of labor, has been shown to reduce the need for

cesarean section, vacuum extraction, and foreseves, and has also been shown to reduce the need for resuscitation in new babies,

which is actually pretty amazing given that this is just a simple herb that

grows all around the country, can be easily harvested, dried, and turned into tea.

Pretty good stuff.

This is Dr. Aviva Rame and I am here today to talk about one of my very favorite topics, herbs in pregnancy.

My background is as an herbalist and a midwife and those two professions which some would say are sort of the second and third oldest professions co arose for me and what I mean by that is when I was first studying midwifery, I was also

studying herbal medicine. And what I found happening is that so many of the women I was working with who were seeking home birth, which is where I was attending birth at home, really wanted to stay away from unnecessary pharmaceuticals as much as possible.

And the reality is that most of the pharmaceuticals that are on the market are not known

to be safe in pregnancy.

In fact, we get new data all the time in the medical world

showing us that things that we thought were safe actually

aren't necessarily sort of the big classic sort of screw-up that happened in medicine, a big screw-up, was the use of

theletomide in pregnant women and then another one was DES. Both theletITAMI and DES were used during pregnancy for prevention

of miscarriage, control of morning sickness, and they turned out to be really disastrous

medications.

Now, the risks of medications that we're using now

don't necessarily reach that magnitude.

Philidomide was associated with a severe abnormality, a deformity, a deformity in the babies that were born to

moms who had taken it.

Those were these flippers, essentially, instead of arms.

...