Stuff You Should Know - The Deal With Doulas

Episode Date: December 12, 2017

The word doula in Ancient Greek might mean "female servant" but it's really not a great description of the 21st century job. Doulas are birth coaches who help women get through the process of childbirth as efficiently and painlessly as possible. They aren't midwives or nurses, but they can provide an invaluable service as advocates. Learn about the deal with doulas right now! Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry over there.

And this is Stuff You Should Know, the podcast. Childbirth edition. Yeah, we are traipsing into more territory. What does that mean? I don't know, I mean, we've done two on feeding babies. Done female puberty. Yeah. This will get into childbirth a little bit.

So yeah, I were not afraid, I don't care. Yeah. I guess is what I'm trying to say. You could be a male doula. You can, although I, this is the only article I ran across that in, did you find anything about that anywhere else? No, I mean, it happens, it's just super rare.

It happens. Because, I mean, we'll go ahead and spoil it. Generally, doulas are, well, let's just get into this. Generally, doulas are women who have already had a baby. Yes. Not even just women, but women who have had a baby. So they can really know how to help another lady have a baby.

Yeah, yeah, and this is actually, so this is an ancient thing that's kind of come back around full circle. And even the name doula is a Greek term used way back in the classical Greek days when a woman giving birth would have female servants attending to her during birth, helping her with it, probably feeding her some grapes,

waving palm fronds on her, that kind of thing. So doula means female servant or female slave depending on who you're talking about. Right. And after ancient Greece fell to Rome and the Roman Empire fell, and all of civilization took this weird course. Throughout it all, women were helped by other women

while they were giving birth. Basically up until about the first third, first half of the 20th century in the West where hospitals entered. And all of a sudden, it was just the mom giving birth surrounded by a bunch of nurses and doctors. Is that true? Yeah.

Because I could see scenarios where there were women in the birth room helping along. I think once you started to get into hospitals and the physicians in the hospital starting asserting their authority more and more, especially through drugs. Like I saw that when hospitals kind of took over the birthing process or took responsibility for it

from the family and from midwives and moved it into the hospital, they used to administer a lot of sedatives as part of the birthing process, as part of labor. You can understand why they would, but then there were all sorts of complications from it, problems from it. So they stopped giving sedatives as much.

And about that time, women who were giving birth started to kind of come out of it and look around and say, whoa, it's just me and you guys in here, I need some family members in here. Right. And at the time, like if you were a dad, you were not in there. You were not in the delivery room at all.

You were out in what was called the Stork Club. Handing out cigars, maybe pacing. And the reason why was because to the doctors involved, it was just another medical procedure. So you're not going to have randos who have nothing to do with the actual procedure in the room during a procedure. They treated childbirth the same way.

But women started to say, no, I need more than just you people who I've never met before really, attending to the birth of my child. And so dads started to come in and then more family members. And then now, doulas have definitely kind of come back like they were originally. That's my understanding of the whole thing.

Yeah, so doulas, we haven't even said what that is yet. And that would probably help clear it up. If you don't know, doulas are people, like we said, generally women, but not always who are childbirth coaches. They coach you through the process. They will, depending on the service they offer, will come on before obviously you give birth

and kind of prep you for what's going to happen. And this, I mean, it kind of depends when your doula will come aboard in the process. But at the very least, they will help you in the delivery room and they are your advocate to kind of coach you through this whole thing. And that term actually started in an article in 1969 by a woman named Dana Raphael,

and then later on in a book in 1973 called The Tender Gift, Breastfeeding. And that's when she brought this term back and said, you know, we're going to start calling these women doulas and it's going to be a real job. Right. And I think at first, what was the name of the woman who brought it back?

Dana Raphael. So she had like a pretty good idea that was actually ahead of its time when doulas really started to come into use and come into their owners of profession was in the 80s. And the reason why they came into wider use was because hospitals were going to C-sections a lot. C-sections went up from 1970,

4.2% of live births in the US involved C-sections. 16 years later in 1986, a quarter of live births in the US involved C-sections. And there were a lot of complications with C-sections. And so you could have your husband in there, you could have your mom in there, you could have friends, but they're just there for you. One of the first services that doulas started offering

was to say, whoa, whoa, whoa, does she really need that C-section? Are you sure about that? Or are you just doing it because you can charge more money? I think that was overstating exactly the interaction they had, but that was the role they had, was to basically provide a barrier between a doctor who wanted to just give a C-section

because he wanted to go home and the mom who really didn't want a C-section. Yeah, and it's not just C-sections, they're your birth advocate to make sure, or at least as best they can to try to ensure that the birth plan that you feel best about is the one that you end up with. Things always change, of course,

and a doula would never put you in danger by insisting on something, in fact, they can't, but they are there to speak for you on your behalf because as a mother in labor, you're going through a lot on your own, so it's nice to have someone that is just there to do that job. Yeah, and is coming from a place of empathy and sympathy

and, most importantly, experience. Like you said, most doulas have had children of their own, but they've also, after a while, attended other births, too, so they know what they're talking about, they know what to expect, and they can tell you what to expect, which can make the whole process easier, I would imagine, for any mother giving birth.

Yeah, it's definitely gained popularity in the 2000s. I think, I tried to find more recent statistics than 2012, but I couldn't. But in 2012, there were 6%, and this is in the United States. It's very much, I know it does happen all over the world some, but it's sort of an American thing. 6% of people in 2012 used a doula versus 3% in 2006,

and in that same survey, 27% of people said they would like to use a doula, so at least they're wishing or hopeful that they can. Yeah, that was question eight. Would you like to use a doula? Yeah. 27% said. And so if you get the impression that a doctor

would not really prefer a doula to be in the labor and delivery room, you've kind of read between the lines there, especially at first, the medical community saw doulas as they were starting to really kind of come into use in the 80s as basically meddling busybodies who could potentially put their patient's life in jeopardy, right?

But then in 1992, doulas of North America was found at Dona. It's like the first doula licensing body, certification and training in licensing body. And they were founded, it was founded by medical professionals, which kind of created a bridge, it bridged the gap or kind of got smoothed over the rough feelings between the medical community and the doula community. And it also added a real air of legitimacy

to the profession of being a doula. Yeah, and the impression I get now is that if you have a good doula who is good with people, which is ideally what your doula is, if your doula's not a people person, it's probably not gonna be a good thing. But the idea I get is that doctors and nurses like having doulas there now because

they can just concentrate on, they don't have to be the ones providing emotional and pathetic support. Although they can still do what they want, they can just concentrate on the medical aspects of it. And they know that they have a trained, hopefully licensed doula, and we'll get into that later, on hand to sort of say, you know what,

I don't have to deal with that part of things, you're in good hands with this doula, and I can just concentrate on the medical parts. Yeah, now all love doula. That's right. And one of the other reasons or functions that doulas provide you kind of hit on is that they provide a service

that hospitals used to provide through nurses, right? Where if you had a nurse in a labor and delivery room, they wouldn't spend as much time or give you as much attention as say, like your mom would or a friend or your husband even. But they gave you a lot more early on than they did as surveillance of patients moved to electronics, right?

To where somebody could just kind of sit at the nurse's station and check on everybody, and they didn't have to go into the rooms, and now you nurses were charged with watching even more people at once, right? So the personal attention dropped dramatically as electronic surveillance of patients increased, and the doulas kind of came in to fill that role as well.

Yeah, like they're sitting in the room with you and hanging out, they don't get called in like 20 minutes before you give birth, they're with you sometimes days and weeks beforehand coaching you on what to expect and how you're gonna go about this and what your plan is. And then on the day, like even if dad is in there

and the husband is in there providing support, that's great, but the doula is just that extra step and that extra measure of support that is super knowledgeable about what it's going to be like where the husband might not exactly be able to lend the most insightful ear there, you know what I mean? Yeah.

So you want to take a break? Yeah, let's take a break and then we'll come back and talk about what to expect when you're expecting to work with a doula. On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces.

We're gonna use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster?

Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there

when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to HeyDude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you.

Oh, man. And so, my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy.

You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say. Bye-bye-bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts

or wherever you listen to podcasts. Do-do-do-do-do-do-do Ah, stop, you should know. Alright, so here's a misconception. Some people think that doulas are authorized or trained to give birth. That is not true. They don't deliver babies. They don't perform any sort of medical procedures. They don't put an IV in your arm. They don't work the heart rate monitor. Most times they don't even work for the hospital. You have hired them independently. And again, they're just there to coach you. They're not even midwives. Midwives can deliver

a baby. Right. Yeah, they're not allowed anywhere near the medical stuff. But they need to know what the medical stuff is so that they can say, well, this is what they're about to do, or this is what they're suggesting right now, and here are your options. And then also, when they're administering the medical stuff, which can be pretty uncomfortable pretty frequently, I would imagine, the doulas there to kind of tell the mom what to expect and to comfort her in all sorts of ways. Yeah, and maybe not even offer advice. Like, I think the idea is that a doula will lay

it all out there so you can make an informed decision and not necessarily say, well, if I were you, this is what I would do. Well, yeah, that's a slippery slope right there because then all of a sudden, if things go wrong, you can say, well, the doula told me to do that and the doula's like, I'm toast. Doulas have to be great listeners. We already talked about the empathy piece. They have to be very empathetic. And they will, like I said, start meeting before birth to answer any kind of questions, come up with that birth plan, and really listen a lot to the wife and the husband. So everybody is on the same page. And like I said, on the day, things

can change. But going in, you generally want to have a pretty good idea of everything from medications you might want to use, if any, to where you want to have the baby. The doula can come on board and kind of explain if they're knowledgeable, which hopefully they are about the hospitals around you, and maybe even help you pick out where you're going to give birth. Yeah. And I mean, if you already have an idea of what you want, the doula can kind of tell you how to make that happen. Or if you have no idea what you want, the doula can also tell you some other alternatives that you might not have thought of. And I saw a parent's magazine article about doulas. They laid out basically what you can expect from the average

doula for the doula's fees. One to two in-person prenatal visits, and then access to the doula for follow-up questions through email or phone calls. They're full attention and presence during your labor. And then sometimes, frequently, I get the idea, a follow-up visit in your house after the baby comes home. Typically, if you hire a doula, this is about the average you can expect to them. There's definitely a lot of differences. Some will give you a little more. Some will give you a little less. Some will charge more. Some will do it for free. It's just all over the place as far as what you're actually going to shell out and what you're going to get from a doula. But for the most part, the doula's going to

have met you before you give birth, and then the doula will be there throughout the whole labor and delivery process. Yeah. And it says in this article that there are specialist doulas like antipartum, doulas, and postpartum doulas, and labor doulas that if you want an antipartum doula, if you want more than those two meetings, you might want to hire someone who will be with you for several weeks beforehand. Or if you want someone postpartum to be with you to coach you through breastfeeding or change in diapers or just any of that kind of coaching, you can hire someone to do that. But I get the sense that doulas generally will sort of work with you on whatever kind

of plan you want. Right. It may cost a little extra, but I get the sense that a doula wouldn't say like, nope, you get two meetings and that's it. They might be like, no, I'll come in for a third and fourth meeting. It'll be an extra of this much money, and I can hang with you for a week or two afterward here and there. I found, I think it was through a BuzzFeed article, I stumbled upon a, there's a huge rift in the doula community, actually, between the typical traditional approach to being

a doula, which is, I'll work with you on a sliding scale for how much you can afford, or this is my fee, but I'll throw in an extra visit just to make you feel like you're getting your money's worth, or I'll do it for free. Yeah. I'll help you because Dona's mission is that a doula for every mother who wants one, like every mother should have a doula basically, right? And then there's this other group called ProDoula, and they can't stand doulas who charge less than a decent amount for their services or do it for free. They actually call doulas who do this for free oxytocin

vampires, like they're just there to bask in the reflective glow of this amazing experience that the mother just went through, the parents just went through. And they're really kind of kicking other doulas around, and they're kind of bullies, it's in a really weird way. But there's like this big debate over whether doulas are undervalued or underselling themselves. But I definitely get the idea that every woman who wants to have a doula should be able to have a doula regardless of her income. That makes sense to me. Like a pro bono for people that don't have as much money? Yeah. On the other hand, I also get that if you are a doula and you're doing your job

really well, that yeah, you should expect to be paid. I think there's a happy medium. I don't think it has to be like, nope, this is the price, and anybody who goes underneath that should be ostracized from the doula community. Yeah. The other thing about doulas, another misconception a lot of people think is that it's just some hippie-dippy thing that if you don't want to, if you only want to have like a natural childbirth, then you get the doula in there and they're not there for anything other than that. And that's not the case. They are there to support you in whatever kind of birth you want to have, whether it's a home birth or water birth, or whether or

not you want to get an epidural or be loaded up on every pharmaceutical they offer, mothers in labor. They're there just to have knowledge of all that stuff so you know what you're getting into. Yep. And then so during labor, this is where the doula shines, right? They're there to help with alternatives to pain treatment, right? So again, they can't administer any kind of drugs or anything. I would guess that they could even get in trouble for giving you an Advil, but they can do other things like they can massage you in ways that you had not ever heard of before that helps with labor pain. I came across this one technique

where they pull on a couple of toes, specific toes, and it helps actually move the labor along if you have a slow labor. There's kneading techniques, there's stroking techniques, pressure on the bottom of your feet. There's all sorts of stuff they can do at various times throughout the labor and delivery process that can help alleviate the pain that you're going through. And that's one of the big roles that they played during labor. Yeah. When my kid was born, I was shocked at how many people were in the room, first of all. How many?

Oh man. Bakers dozen? I mean... 20? Emily and I, birth mom, obviously. Our adoption counselor who was a licensed doula, so she really served that function for the birth mom, which was really a great, great plus. The doctor, I guess, I'm not even sure what the roles are, what their technical titles

are, but the doctor came in when it was go time and basically just checked things out and said, well, I think it's go time and then he stepped out of the way and these two nurses came in there and 90 seconds later there was a baby. So it was, and those were, so it was two nurses, there was probably like, there was probably at least 12 people in that room. Wow. That's a lot of people. It was crowded and fast and surreal and weird and amazing. Even weirder they brought in carrot top to cut the cord, right?

No, Emily cut the cord. Okay, cool. They actually helped sort of deliver in a way because they like to bring in, I guess, in a regular biological birth, it would be the husband probably in there saying, hey, do you want to help hold the legs or do whatever? In this case, it was Emily and I just took a respectful position by the birth mom's head sort of looking down that way. I was like, she was like, you can go wherever you want to go, but I was like, I'll just

hang right here. Right. And Emily's like, that's right. Yeah. I just, I wanted to be there. And you know, I was helping support her as well, holding her hand and patting her on the head and all that nice stuff. That's cool, man.

Yeah, it was amazing. Did I ever tell you the story for when my niece Mila was born and my sister-in-law was giving birth and she let everybody in the labor room? I was surprised. You can have a party in there. Yeah. And when she really was going into, she was delivering, I stood back behind this curtain, right?

And the doctor comes in and walks past me and kind of gives me a nod and I hear him go to the car. He's like, you know, there's like some guy standing behind that curtain, right? Yeah, he's supposed to be there. That was pretty funny. He's the ward creeper. Right, exactly. I'm like, okay, I've heard enough here.

I'm going to the next room. All right, well, let's take another break now that we've shared our stories. We'll come back and talk a little bit about how you become a doula right for this. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best

decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia

starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road.

Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you.

Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that Michael and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step, not another one, kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now.

And so tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, Chuck. So if you wanted to become a doula, basically you start in training at age three, you're sent off to Europe to apprentice at the one doula school in the world and they make you eat a lot of magic cake.

And then when you're 60, you get to actually start out on your own. That's exactly right. Okay. Well, before you decide to become a doula, you need to get a lot of thought on what you're going to be getting into. The hours are long, childbirth is very stressful and especially if there are complications, it can be super stressful in a matter of life or death. So you got to be able to deal with that stuff in the moment and hang in there and be the

birth coach that mom needs in the most stressful situations. But then on the plus side, you get to see little babies coming out on the reg and what's better than that? I can't think of too many things. Talk about an oxytocin hit. Maybe magic cake. Magic cake? You do not have to have a college degree.

You don't have to have a high school degree. You don't even have to be certified. It's not law that you have to be certified. Yeah, you don't, but there are more and more programs now and more certification and licensing programs out there. So if you want to be a doula, my advice is to go that route. You probably just get more work that way. Right.

So when you're starting out, you would go to, if you wanted to get certified, you would go to one of the certifying bodies like Dona or what are the other two that are mentioned in here? There's one called CAPPA. CAPPA? Sure. It's the American Pregnancy Association. All three of those certify and train doulas.

From what I could tell, this is the oldest, obviously, it was the first one. It seems to be the most respected, but I would guess if you get your training from any of those three, you're probably doing pretty good. They'll offer online classes, in-person classes, self-paced study, and you typically need to go take a birthing class, a breastfeeding class, because again, you need to know, you need to be current on all the stuff that's going on with labor and delivery, right? If you took these classes 10 years ago and then did it again today, you would probably find some real differences in new stuff that's been discovered in the last 10 years.

So you would need to be pretty current, even if you had kids of your own before. And then you also need to attend, at least one, I have the impression that multiple births under the apprenticeship of another doula who's already certified or trained or experienced before you really go off on your own to become certified. I would say, how many births have you been a part of already before I hired a doula? That's a pretty big question, if you ask me. So they would want to say, well, I've been, you know, I've assisted in like three or five or however many, but you're going to be my first solo.

Your first solo flight? Yep. It depends on where you live and how much you're going to pay. If you live in a big fancy city, like New York City, you're going to be paying top dollar for your doula. If you live in Los Angeles, you're going to be paying top dollar for your doula. I sell like 3,500 at least for each of those cities. Yeah, but that scale can go all the way down to zero.

Well, sure, all the way to zero, but if you're paying a doula, that number can go all the way down to $600 to $800,000 in the flyover states. But again, I mean, like if this is the doula's first time on their own, you're probably not going to be paying top dollar. And if you say, look, I really, really, really want to have a doula at my child's birth, but I really genuinely don't have this money. I actually got a lift once from a doula, and she was talking about having to deal with this family who clearly was very well off, but was pleading poverty.

And she was like, I'm the one who's a doula and driving a lift here, and these guys are trying to like short change me. So she said, she told them no, she said she tried to work with them, but they wouldn't budge about whatever they thought her services were worth. So she had to just walk on. But why would a family that's well off not pay $800? I don't know. I don't know, because I remember thinking like, wow, that's all it costs for a doula.

She might have even been quoting them less than $800. Geez. Yeah. But there is definitely like, there seems to be a tension between the desire to have a doula and the sense of non-obligation to pay a doula a decent wage, which I think is where that pro doula group pulls their hair out. Right. Yeah.

Well, you may get it covered by insurance. There are more and more cases in insurance companies that will let something like this be covered, but it never hurts to ask this article points out. You can always ask, you can always file a claim and just see if you'll get a little assistance there. Yeah. If you live in Oregon and Minnesota, though, Medicaid will reimburse your full doula expenses for a certified doula, which is pretty awesome.

Like that's huge and groundbreaking that those two states have that. For sure. The reason why they would pay anything for a doula rather than just being like, just burn some sage or something and spend five bucks is because there has been studies about doulas and they have come out quite positive in some pretty good peer-reviewed studies and peer-reviewed journals. Have you seen any of this? Well, yeah.

I saw the one, 15,000 people, that's a pretty decent study size. They said in this study size, there were some women who had doulas and some women who did not have doulas or any kind of support like that, and then outcomes for women with continuous support were better than those without, meaning their labors were shorter by about 40 minutes on average. Their babies had higher APCAR scores, which APCAR, these tests, they give your baby. Like the first thing your kid has to do is take a test. I know.

So, seconds later, they're giving your kid their first test. Yeah, activity, pulse, grimace, appearance, and respiration. That's right. Yeah. And so, higher APCAR scores, fewer negative feelings about childbirth, like this is the emotional component, they required less pain, medication, fewer uses of forceps or vacuum assisted interventions, C-sections. Across the board, doulas helped, and what was really interesting was there was basically

nothing that could point at that said having a doula was a negative in any way. Yeah, and even when they looked just at doulas rather than just all types of continuous support, just at doulas, the doulas they held up to, there was less use of pitocin, less C-section, more spontaneous vaginal deliveries, less of a risk of being admitted to a special care nursery, four times less likely in one study to have a low birth weight child, two times less likely to have complications, and they were significantly more likely to initiate breastfeeding when cared for by a doula, right? So there's all these demonstrably positive outcomes, and then you hit upon the other

thing too that they make the harsh hospital environment, there's something called harsh environment theory where the bright lights and the people you don't know coming in and out and treating you like a piece of meat that they need to get this thing out of, that it can actually produce a traumatic experience, I suspect in more women than you would think having birth or giving birth in a hospital is kind of traumatic, and for some women from what I read it's like deeply traumatic, and that's been a huge reason that doulas have really come into use lately is because they mellow everything out for you a lot more, and there's actually, I read there's a group of renegade doulas who are acting as midwives

out in the pot growing country of Northern California. What's the relationship there to the pot growing? I would guess they probably do both, they grow the pot and deliver the babies. I think it's kind of like a whole back to the earth to hell with the man's establishment hospitals, apparently it's illegal to give birth like this without like a certified someone from the medical community being there to assist in the delivery, they're saying nuts to that, which I would guess is pretty dangerous but also illegal, and if there's anything that screams Northern California more than dangerous and illegal, I don't know.

If you want to use a doula, and I'm officially endorsing this, I say don't say don't say doula, sorry I couldn't resist on that one. You just get online, doulas are easy to find in your area, do a little Google search in, get a reference, a personal reference if you can, would be great. Get online, find a friend who is used to doula, they can recommend, I mean that's really the best way, I don't know if I'd go on Yelp or anything like that or Angie's List, although maybe who knows, but it's better if a good friend says hey I use this doula and she's great.

I think also the certifying bodies have directories of certified doulas in areas too. Yeah, I mean you want it to be a good personality match too, so you should talk to your doula on the phone at the very least, but ideally have a little in-person meeting to make sure like is this someone I want to jump into the foxhole with because they're going to be around a lot and you have to have a good personality match there. Well yeah and your husband or co-parent needs to like them too, you don't want weird tension between those two in the delivery room. They need to fit into your jam pretty well or else it's just going to be, especially

if you're one of those people who can't stand conflict, that would be awful to have a doula who your husband or co-parent or wife or whoever doesn't like and butts heads with in the delivery room, that would just be bad and then you have to pay them afterward, that would just be terrible. So yeah, you want to vet them pretty well ahead of time. Yeah and while you, while a doula is there to support you, so while they may have their own opinions on what they might do in a given situation, their childbirth philosophy is, your childbirth philosophy as a mom is what matters, so a good doula will get on board

with that or if they aren't on board with that, then they probably shouldn't be working with you. And yeah, I can see them being like, look, I can recommend a couple of other people who are more in line with what you're looking for than me, you know? Yeah. Instead of wrong, wrong, wrong, this is all wrong, this is how we're going to do it. That's right. You got anything else on doulas?

Just this little bit on death doulas, we may have covered this in our, jeez, in our dying episode. Yeah, that's what I was thinking. I feel like we've talked about it, but it is a job. If you want to help a family or a person or both through end of life care, there are people you can hire just to do that and it's not the same as, they can work in concert with hospice care, but it's not like a hospice nurse, it's someone just like a birth doula who is there to really just emotionally kind of coach you through the dying process with

a family member. And also to very concretely hold your hand, make sure you're comfortable, move you around a little bit, listen to you talk, tell you stories, whatever you're looking for to make the whole thing better. That's right. Pretty neat. Up with doulas. Yeah, up with doulas, agreed.

If you want to know more about Up with Doulas, this new organization that Chuck and I just now founded, you can, I'll just wait a little while, we need to get to work on the website. And in the meantime, let's listen to some listener mail. All right, I'm going to call this flu shot clarification because that's what the subject line says. Okay. Hey guys, Abbott listener wanted to comment on the flu episode. I'm a graduate student a few months away from completing my degree to becoming a physician's

assistant. Well, never mind then buddy, I don't want to hear it. No, I'm just kidding. I spent a lot of time seeing patients answering questions about things like flu shots and who should receive them. The CDC now recommends that everyone over the age of six months receives a flu shot. Even those who are perfectly healthy, even those who are allergic to eggs. They're cuckoo for flu shots.

The flu shots are now being designed to be egg free. So they're egg free, gluten free. What else? Dairy free. They contain 10% quinoa. And there's no evidence to suggest flu shots in recent years could cause reaction in those allergic to eggs. All right.

What's interesting? Did not know that. He said the benefits of the flu shots far outweighed the risk in his opinion. In this guy's opinion. Yeah. And it sounds like it's an informed opinion at the very least. Sure. So that is from Devin from Philadelphia.

Go Eagles. Do you think so really? Yeah, I mean, why not? They're doing great. Okay. Well, thanks a lot, Devin. I appreciate writing in. That was nice of you.

And if you out there want to be like Devin, you can tweet to us at Josh M. Clark or SYSK podcast. You can join us on facebook.com slash stuff you should know or slash Charles W. Chuck Bryant. You can hang out with us on email at stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com and as always join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the

cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.

Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band or each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.