It’s the alternative delivery method that midwives say will be standard prenatal practice within a decade. Hospitals across the country are reporting a surge in demand for hypnobirthing classes, which focus on relaxation and self-hypnosis during the childbirth process.
When Colchester Hospital University NHS Trust in Essex began offering hypnotbirth classes in 2012, they ran one class per month, teaching around 48 women per year. After steady increases in 2013 and 2014, the trust made the decision to offer the course for free. They now run 10 hypnobirthing classes per month and plan to teach between 720 and 960 women in hypnobirthing in 2015.
Almost 25% of women giving birth in the hospital and delivery units of the Colchester Trust have completed a pre-delivery hypnobirthing course and almost one in six midwives in the trust are instructors in the trust. ‘hypnobirthing trained.
“It seems like the whole world wants to practice hypnotism,” said Teri Gavin-Jones, midwife and hypnobirth trainer at the trust. “Hypnobirth is where childbirth in the water was 20 years ago. At the time, it was considered a bit odd and there was a lot of skepticism from the community. “But now every trust in the country is watering births. Give her 10 years old and hypnobirthing will be standard prenatal practice. It will be mainstream.”
At the Royal Wolverhampton Hospitals NHS Trust, the numbers are less dramatic, with around 5% of mothers using hypnobirthing, but the trust has seen the number of women taking classes triple in the past five years.
Couples in hypnobirthing classes, which are subsidized by some NHS trusts and cost around £ 300 for five sessions given by a private teacher, learn visualization, deep relaxation and breathing techniques, as well as self-hypnosis .
Rachel Chilver, 35, first encountered hypnobirthing while researching while pregnant with her first child and, despite being “quite skeptical”, decided to take the course at the Colchester hospital.
Chilver, a city performing arts lecturer, said hypnobirthing made the birth process of her now six-month-old daughter, Winnie, “absolutely amazing.”
“There was a feeling, but I wouldn’t say it was pain. It was pressure, I needed to use a breathing technique to deal with it, but I never said, “Ooh, pain. “For a short time during labor, she completely stopped feeling the contractions -” It must be the mildly hypnotic state I was getting into “- and as it became” intense “towards the end, she gave birth. within two hours of arriving at the hospital without the help of pain relievers. Most importantly to her, Chilver said that at the end of the process, she felt “really proud and empowered.”
Some women reported feeling no pain.
Katharine Graves, founder of KG Hypnobirthing and author of The Hypnobirthing Book, said she has met many women – including her own stepdaughter – who have given birth painlessly.
“Hypnobirth works on the premise that it is unnatural to be in pain. [in labour] in the first place. The root of the problem is fear because everyone “knows” that childbirth is painful, so people have a bad experience and pass it on. If you’re in my world, you frequently get reports from women saying birth was the most uplifting and wonderful experience and that no medication was needed, ”Graves said.
She calls the growth of hypnobirthing in the UK a revolution and said it has grown so rapidly mainly due to the ‘strong and independent profession of midwifery’ and word of mouth in Great Britain. -Brittany.
Scientific evidence is inconclusive as to the impact of hypnobirthing on pain. Some NHS trusts have started collecting data, with Wolverhampton Trust reporting that 80% of hypnobirthing mothers have normal births without pain medication, compared to 60% of the general population who have a normal birth. A small scale 2006 study in Australia found that women who learned prenatal self-hypnosis techniques reported fewer epidurals (36%) than the control group (53%) and less use of other forms of pain relief.
However, the largest study on the subject, a randomized trial of 680 pregnant women in the UK known as SHIP test, reported that self-hypnosis made no difference to either the method of delivery – normal, instrumental, or Caesarean – or the use of analgesic treatment between the group that learned the techniques of self -hypnosis and the control group, although the hypnosis group reported a decrease in birth anxiety.
Gail Johnson, an education advisor at the Royal College of Midwives, said women shouldn’t be frightened by the method. “It’s not ‘one, two, three, go into a trance and wake up with a baby.’ The process of hypnobirthing is not necessarily about hypnosis, it is often about focusing on something other than the pain of labor and that’s not something particularly new.
“It’s always important for women to have confidence that the people who run the classes are competent and that they are looking for reputable coaches, but we believe anything that gives women more choice in their pain relief is good. . We’re not saying it’s good for all women, it’s part of a larger spectrum of support and care for women.
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