Hi everyone in this podcast we're going to talk about what is evidence-based care.

Welcome to the evidence Space Birth Podcast.

Join us each week as I tackle the evidence on another hot topic about childbirth.

As a reminder, this information is not medical advice.

See Eviebirth.com slash disclaimer for more details.

So welcome to today's podcast. In our last session we talked about how I

started evidence-based birth and why I got into writing about the research on

childbirth. In today's podcast we're going to talk about what is

what is evidence-based care?

Is it a specific way of giving birth?

Is it a checklist?

Really, what is it not?

Well, first let's talk about the old way of doing things in medicine.

It used to be that medicine was practiced entirely based on a doctor's clinical opinion, experience, and unsystematic observations.

I'll give you an example of something that I read from a 1950s obstetrics journal.

A physician was writing about how he decided to manually remove a woman's

placenta.

In other words, after the woman gave birth,

he physically reached up with his hand into the

woman's uterus and removed the placenta with his hand. He said it went well

so he decided to do it with all of his patients.

200 births later he wrote, quote,

...