Health For You

Fetal heart-rate (FHR) monitoring.

Is common practice in many U.S. hospitals, to provide continuous fetal monitoring even for women who aren’t yet in labor.

In many U.S. hospitals, it is common practice to provide continuous fetal monitoring even for women who aren’t yet in labor. This practice could result in unnecessary panic in patients – and physicians. Fetal heart-rate (FHR) monitoring may be a technology that can cause as much harm as good.

Many fetal heart rates will drop for a minute or two, every four or five hours. If the fetus otherwise shows no sign of distress, many in the physician community wonder if it is worth acting on.

Short-lived decelerations might just be the nature of the pre-labor condition. And since a baby’s heart rate is not monitored for hours on end, it’s a bit hard to tell.

“If you continuously monitor every fetus, you’ll get those things in, let’s say, 100 percent of the cases,” writes one physician on the site. “Electronic FHR monitoring can be very helpful, but also problematic at the same time.”

“As medicine becomes increasingly codified, collected around medical guidelines and checklists, it’s amazing how many clinical decisions just aren’t clear-cut,” says Pamela Moore, senior vice president of content and strategy for UBM Medica US. “In the U.S., we need more debates like these to reveal where we can cut medical costs while also offering… continue reading

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