How midwives like me can help fight medical misinformation
A nurse-midwife discusses the challenges of addressing medical misinformation, specifically regarding patients who refuse blood transfusions from vaccinated donors. The author highlights the tension between respecting patient autonomy and the potential for preventable medical harm.
Why it matters
This highlights the growing impact of vaccine hesitancy and medical misinformation on clinical decision-making and patient safety.
Evans is a nurse-midwife in North Carolina and is on faculty at Georgetown University’s Berkley School of Nursing.
In the dimmed light of a hospital room in Nevada, the placenta — blue and shining — has just delivered. I coaxed it gently, spinning the warm, bloody organ and twisting the trailing membranes into a compact coil, leaving nothing behind. Even a small fragment of placenta or membrane can prevent the uterus from contracting properly, failing to squeeze shut the great vessels that have spent 40 weeks surging with blood to feed a growing baby. If those vessels do not abruptly close, blood continues pumping into the empty uterus and a hemorrhage begins.
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