All right, so in this video, we're going to talk about the research evidence on childbirth

education. By the end of this video, you'll be able to describe some of the main limitations to

research on the effects of childbirth education. And you'll be able to discuss the available

studies on the effects of childbirth education. First of all, before I talk about the research

evidence, I need to talk about the

limitations of the evidence. Childbirth education does not exist in a vacuum, and by that,

I mean that when a person attends childbirth education, they may be affected differently

depending on who their care provider is, what their pre-existing beliefs and values are,

and where they're giving birth. Also, it's very difficult to conduct

randomized trials on childbirth education. And then once they're conducted, it's very

difficult to combine and consolidate the results between studies. That's because every education

intervention is different. And researchers measure different outcomes, making it very difficult to compare studies.

Basically, it's really, really difficult to make a blanket statement about the effects of childbirth

education. In this update of this video, we did a search in May of 2019 and looked for systematic

reviews, meta-analyses, and randomized controlled trials on childbirth education.

We first searched for childbirth education in general, and then we did targeted searches

looking for any research studies on Lamas, Bradley, hypno-birthing, hypno-babies, etc.

The vast majority of studies on childbirth education were on generic, quote, childbirth

education classes, where they've usually

barely described what is taught in the classes. So we found a 2018 Cochrane meta-analysis on ways to

reduce the cesarean rate, a 2018 review on ways to improve the birth experience, a 2017 meta-analysis

on ways to reduce fear of childbirth, Recent randomized controlled trials on complementary therapies for pain management,

...