Hospitalization and Pregnancy

The creation of a multitude of Departments of Pregnancy Pathology and the formation of a large bed capacity became, in their time, one of the specific features of Russian Obstetrics. Even today, each gynecology hospital and each maternity home has one or even several departments of the kind. Whereas in the structure of foreign perinatal centres, departments like these can be counted on fingers. At the same time, both the child and the maternal mortality rates in European countries look much better when depicted in graphs. So what is the matter? May it be that we are all utterly sick and our pregnancy is a disease? And that it needs to be treated? Most preferably, at an inpatient facility for weeks on end?

This is, probably, not the case after all. The thing is that both our entire country and our Medicine have their own unique way of doing things. And for a very long time, we kept proudly aloof from others, relying upon our own ideas of the genesis of diseases, treatment methods, prophylaxis et cetera. This is good in a way but it is advisable that we should sometimes compare our ideas with the ideas of other equally worthy colleagues. And this is where we had a fairly serious gap in experience…

Aside from this moment, historically it came about that, for whatever reason, all ideas and interpretations of merited doctors were immediately transformed into orders that a medical practitioner could not possibly disobey. If a patient has a certain complaint, one has to react in a certain way. Most often, by way of a “forced voluntary” hospitalization… I think, each of us experienced or heard about a situation when a patient “rests in bed for a week or so, gets two injections with No-Spa, has his/her urine collected and gets self-discharged upon signing a self-discharge form”. It is difficult to say, whether doctors have helped the patient, but they have executed an algorithm and are happy about it. But whether a patient has contracted some of the hospital infections is quite a different story.

At present, a lot of evidential studies argue that hospitalization and bed rest do not help in any way. They just imitate treatment. We would really like to gradually move beyond such imitations and offer patients treatment that would have at least some effectiveness.