Plan to register with a reliable obstetrician

Most women are aware of the importance of regular medical care during pregnancy and you should plan to register with a reliable obstetrician as soon as you find out that you are pregnant. This ensuing pre-natal care will then simply be an extension of your pre-pregnancy care. While modern obstetric care can ensure that pregnancy and childbirth are very safe for both mother and baby, unfortunately, today doctors have ‘medicalized’ pregnancy to such an extent that what is otherwise a normal event has been converted to one which needs rigorous and frequent medical assistance. Every mother naturally wants a normal baby, and technology can be very useful in reassuring her that all is well. However, it's easy to misuse technology. One particularly disturbing trend stems from the fact that many obstetricians nowadays overuse medical technology; such overuse can often prove detrimental to both the mother and the baby. Common tests which are misused include: blood tests for TORCH (Toxoplasmosis, Rubella, Cytomegalovirus; Herpes) infections; ultrasound scans; and foetal monitoring. Another area of misuse relates to the tests available for screening the baby for a possible birth defect. Many doctors routinely subject their patients to a ‘triple test’ during the pregnancy to screen for birth defects. While this is an easy test (it’s a simple blood test which measures the levels of 3 hormones in the blood) to carry out unfortunately, it has still not been standardized for Indian women. Such a drawback leads to a large number of tests yielding abnormal results, even though the babies are completely normal. An ‘abnormal’ result creates a lot of anxiety
And then the doctor needs to perform a battery of other tests to confirm that the baby is, in fact, normal to reassure the mother. The second tier of tests can be expensive, and risky as well, because some of them can cause the mother to miscarry. Thus, it is not uncommon for a mother to lose a healthy baby because of a test which was not really required in the first place!