Today's attack by midwifery professor Dr Denis Walsh on the right of birthing women to pain relief was the final push*: I'm tipped over the edge into the blogosphere. Media assaults on parents, or more usually mothers, by professionals who are paid to help them have been getting my goat for years. This one, judging by the comments on the article and talk sites, has been raising maternal blood pressure across the land.
Why are mothers still having to fight to decide for ourselves how we birth, where we birth, who helps us, and how we deal with the pain? Because of 'experts' like Walsh who will never consent to trusting women with informed choice. And I'm not very impressed with the NCT on this one, either.
There's so much that could be said about the pernicious crap Walsh is spreading. I'm just going to stick to presenting his comments in the context of life's other major agonizing event. One which, unlike giving birth, he will actually experience.
(*Sorry, wish could resist these birth puns.)
- - -
Press release 12 July 2009
"Pain relief epidemic" in palliative care services
Dr Denis Wilsh, one of the country's most influential end of life care specialists, today hit out at what he called a “pain relief epidemic” within palliative services. Pain-relieving drugs, including morphine injections, carry serious medical risks, diminish death as a rite of passage and prevent thousands of patients from experiencing death as nature intended.
"A large number of people want to avoid pain. Some just don't fancy the pain [of dying]. More people should be prepared to withstand pain," he told the Observer. "Pain in dying is a purposeful, useful thing, which has quite a number of benefits.”
“We’ve known for decades that the agony of death prepares people for the shedding of their mortal body and entry into the next world. In previous centuries enlightened authorities even helped sinful souls by using burning at the stake to prepare them for hellfire,” he continued.
"In the west it has never been safer to die, yet it appears that people have never been more frightened of the processes," Wilsh said. He claims that 20% of end of life patients who receive morphine don't need it.
Celebrity deaths such as that of Jade Goody, and television portrayals of death as a highly medicalised process have added to a culture where pain relief seems normal, even though dying pains are natural, healthy and temporary, he said.
In a sharply worded critique of the rising popularity of pain-free death, Wilsh warns that normal death is in danger of being "effectively anaesthetised by the analgesic epidemic" in the NHS. A widespread "antipathy to dying pain" has emerged in the past 20 years and combined with increased patient rights and risk-averse doctors to create a situation where almost all hospitals now offer pain relief on demand, even if that is not in the patient’s or family’s interests.
The NHS should abandon routine pain relief and embrace a new "working with pain" approach which would encourage patients to use yoga, hypnosis, massage, support from their partners, hydrotherapy and dying pools as natural ways of alleviating their pain, he said.
"Over recent decades there has been a loss of 'rites of passage' meaning to death, so that pain and stress are viewed negatively," said Wilsh. Patients should be told that dying pain is a timeless component of the "rites of passage" transition to the next world, he added.
Mary Oldburn of the National Dying Trust, the end of life charity, said Wilsh's comments were timely and important. She blamed inadequate end of life education, lack of palliative nurse-run death centres and the fact that 93% of deaths happened in hospital for creating the "pain relief culture".
