Stool Toilets Promote Hemoroids

Animals in second-stage labor, then, act, look, and breathe as though they are having a bowel movement. So what should your wife do after her cervix is completely open and the baby begins to slip through? She should do the same thing. Now, here again, we run into the minor structural differences between humans and animals. They are minor but important. You will have made a careful study of how your wife conducts herself in sleep for management of the first-stage labor. Must you now make a similar study in the bathroom and see how your wife manages a bowel movement? Definitely not. For two reasons. One is she just might resent such invasion of her privacy, and the other reason is she's not conducting herself correctly there anyway. This isn't her fault, it's the fault of so-called civilization and the invention of toilet stools. These gadgets designed erroneously to make it easier for human beings have probably been instrumental in keeping proctologists (rectal specialists) in business. This point was brought to my mind rather emphatically early in my specialty training by having made the acquaintance of a young doctor from India who had come to this country and to the same university for postgraduate specialty training. I found him a fascinating chap and we became close friends. One day we entered the men's rest room together and to my amazement he climbed up on the American toilet with his feet on the lid and assumed the squatting position. At my sarcastic jibes he countered with the statement that in his country people properly squatted to move their bowels and that in his medical training in India he had not observed hemorrhoids; he had had to come to my country to find these abnormalities. We got into a heated discussion of what constituted civilization. I frankly didn't believe his statement that the bathroom facilities in his lavish home in India consisted of openings on the level floor over which one squatted. I'm sure his mother in India was most bewildered when she received a request in his next letter that she photograph their bathroom and send the picture along, but she obligingly did so and thus helped to educate this backward foreigner.

Robert A. Bradley, James Hathaway, Jay Hathaway, Marjie Hathaway, Husband-Coached Childbirth (Fifth Edition): The Bradley Method of Natural Childbirth (2008-05-20)

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