Revolutionary new birthing device based on party trick

December 5, 2013 9:34 PM

The Odon childbirthing device Argentinian car mechanic Jorge Odon saw this party trick. It occurred to him it could help with difficult births. It seems he may be right.
posted by holist (48 comments total)

Midwifes HATE him!
posted by Phssthpok at 9:43 PM on December 5, 2013 [32 favorites]

Clever.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 9:46 PM on December 5, 2013

Have an easier birth with this one weird trick?
posted by borges at 9:49 PM on December 5, 2013 [15 favorites]

I watched the trick video before reading the article, and I thought "I bet there will be a line of volunteers waiting to blow up the bag"
posted by Gorgik at 9:51 PM on December 5, 2013 [2 favorites]

Phssthpok, do you have any intel on why midwives hate him? Also, a quick search seems to indicate that not all midwives hate him. borges, it is certainly not presented as a panacea, but it does seem an improvement on the forceps, no?
posted by holist at 9:53 PM on December 5, 2013 [1 favorite]

holist, it was a joke.
posted by empath at 9:56 PM on December 5, 2013 [6 favorites]

holist, can you recommend an ad blocker? Yours seems to work well.
posted by aw_yiss at 9:57 PM on December 5, 2013 [115 favorites]

And the baby then has to spend the whole rest of its life trying to get back in.
posted by not_on_display at 9:58 PM on December 5, 2013

Meanwhile, the "healthcare establishment" continues to ignore my revolutionary Inspired-By-the-Phonebook-Thing-Caesarean procedure. What are you so afraid of, Big Med?!?
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 10:04 PM on December 5, 2013 [1 favorite]

The next phase was to test the device in real-life situations.

"The first time I saw it used I promised that if it worked, I would shave off my moustache," Odon says. The moustache had to go.

Clearly they're trying to stoke the flames of the Movember controversy somehow...
posted by kaibutsu at 10:09 PM on December 5, 2013 [1 favorite]

holist: "One Weird Trick"

...I'd find an article on the "Xs hate him" thing, too, but my head feels like it's going to make like a Gallagher watermelon.
posted by KChasm at 10:10 PM on December 5, 2013

Luckily, the dry-cleaning bag prototype was immediately nixed.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 10:10 PM on December 5, 2013

"Without breaking the bottle," indeed. I was going to make some comment about how laymen often think they know better than the professionals and they're usually wrong--but I guess in this case the mechanic really is the professional, when it's a purely mechanical solution.
posted by Sequence at 10:11 PM on December 5, 2013

Oh. I missed the joke, sorry. Given the "age-old practices work best, medical innovation is evil" slant of a certain segment of the midwifery movement, I found it quite plausible for some midwives to hate him. But okay, haha. :)
posted by holist at 10:16 PM on December 5, 2013 [5 favorites]

The trick with the bottle depends on the fact that the bottle is solid and can hold a lot of pressure. I don't think that's the case with most mothers' wombs.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 10:21 PM on December 5, 2013

This wouldn't hurt the baby's neck or prevent them from breathing? The animation makes it look terrifying.
posted by gucci mane at 10:23 PM on December 5, 2013 [2 favorites]

Apparantly babies only start breathing outside the womb, so no.
posted by MartinWisse at 10:26 PM on December 5, 2013 [4 favorites]

I'm glad his prototype didn't involve using automobile airbags to blow the baby out.
posted by BrotherCaine at 10:52 PM on December 5, 2013 [6 favorites]

Quite a feel-good story; father of five who is concerned for women's health, and who wants his invention to be affordable to help as many as possible, doctors with open minds who listen to his pitch, expectant mothers who volunteer to test the device. Mankind isn't that bad after all!

And now I want to find a bottle, cork and plastic bag at home to test the party trick.
posted by Harald74 at 11:35 PM on December 5, 2013 [11 favorites]

It doesn't always work quite this well... although I am completely failing at finding anything online about it, about 6 or 7 years ago, at an exhibition for inventors here in Budapest, I met a granddad who was seriously pushing his revolutionary idea for obstetrics: putting the entire birthing room on a variable-speed rotating platform, with the birthing bed affixed radially in order to use centripetal acceleration to assist with birthing. He completely did not understand the frequent hysterical laughter that he engendered.
posted by holist at 11:52 PM on December 5, 2013 [9 favorites]

Well, after a bit of digging around, I found it. The translation is a bit crap, but some of it is okay.
posted by holist at 12:20 AM on December 6, 2013 [1 favorite]

A similar idea has also been patented. I first heard about this idea when one of my college professors based an exam question on it.
posted by JiBB at 12:36 AM on December 6, 2013 [1 favorite]

Have an easier birth with this one weird trick?

There's a sucker born every minute!
posted by MuffinMan at 12:52 AM on December 6, 2013 [5 favorites]

We've had out first baby in the last year, so we've looked at the risk profile recently. Massively generalising:
* Least risky: a perfect "natural" vaginal birth where nothing goes wrong at all.
* Next least risky: a planned caesarean section.
* More risky: an emergency caesarean section.
* Really quite risky: forceps deliveries.

Forceps deliveries are dangerous for mother and baby. So, knowing nothing about obstetrics, it's reasonable that a new technique specifically useful for when forceps would be employed might be of benefit.
posted by alasdair at 2:09 AM on December 6, 2013

It's more appropriate than using this party trick.
posted by ardgedee at 2:39 AM on December 6, 2013 [3 favorites]

Am I the only one disappointed that the party trick wasn't the one where you stick a bottle in the heel of your shoe and smack if on the wall?
posted by Pinback at 2:40 AM on December 6, 2013 [7 favorites]

Its a clever birthday trick :)
posted by ngsandy1618 at 2:49 AM on December 6, 2013

Well, this is going to make for some pretty complicated bar bets. First of all, you'll have to have a full-term pregnant woman on hand, not to mention a plastic bread bag and a cork.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 4:54 AM on December 6, 2013 [2 favorites]

There is a precedent for the repurposing of automotive service equipment to labor-delivery applications.
posted by klarck at 5:01 AM on December 6, 2013 [1 favorite]

Forceps deliveries are dangerous for mother and baby.

Fun fact: the reason why Sylvester Stallone mumbles? Forceps baby; the delivery damaged a nerve in his face.
posted by Halloween Jack at 5:11 AM on December 6, 2013 [1 favorite]

That looks really promising. Streets ahead of the 'strap woman into spinning stretcher and catch baby in a net' machine.

Yeah another forceps delivery here... when your daughter asks you what she looked like when she was born don't say 'deformed' even if that is a reasonable summary.
posted by Trivia Newton John at 5:15 AM on December 6, 2013 [2 favorites]

Forceps deliveries are dangerous for mother and baby.

Not necessarily; it depends on what kind of forceps delivery.

This new device looks interesting though; I'll be interested to see if it lives up to its initial promise.
posted by TedW at 5:38 AM on December 6, 2013 [2 favorites]

It bums me out that this won't be available before I have a baby in May.
posted by amro at 5:44 AM on December 6, 2013 [1 favorite]

Fun fact: the reason why Sylvester Stallone mumbles? Forceps baby; the delivery damaged a nerve in his face.

My ex's face was cut during her mom's c-section. The scar looked different than an adult scar. It was kind of a soft groove rather than tough shiny tissue.
posted by nathancaswell at 6:46 AM on December 6, 2013 [2 favorites]

It is scary looking, but maybe not quite as scary as the various tongs and scoopers they've used in the past.

GET THE SALAD SPOONS, MAN!
posted by delfin at 6:46 AM on December 6, 2013

Also, this works better than the Mentos birthing method because they can't figure out a good way to fill the uterus with Pepsi.
posted by delfin at 6:48 AM on December 6, 2013 [7 favorites]

I'm really glad the youtube party trick wasn't the one where you use an empty water bottle to separate eggs.
posted by jacquilynne at 7:19 AM on December 6, 2013 [1 favorite]

I'm not very qualified to speak on this topic, so I was hoping someone else would get to it first. But as a solution to a problem we don't have, this isn't even new or useful. There are several vacuum cap devices used in difficult deliveries and none of these trial runs were in difficult deliveries. Natural delivery isn't a big deal until it is, and things go so wrong so fast at that point ...

If you want to make labor and delivery easier, my first move would be to stop trying to fight gravity, but what do I know.

This is not a useful device and while OBGYN needs a ton of fresh air and sunshine in my humble opinion I can't see this ever taking off in a meaningful way given that there's a highly vascularized placenta attached to a uterus that has a direct pipeline to the largest blood vessel in your body. I can't see how this wouldn't directly cause uterine prolapse even when used correctly, and inevitable if used incorrectly.

A brand new baby is also very fragile. You can't pull with any real force against the vacuum being created on the other end of the baby, their spine is not going to withstand the forces, I won't elaborate.

I only have seen forceps used once, and that was in deeply rural Mexico, and by a midwife. I haven't even seen forceps in a hospital in the US..these days everyone jumps straight to c-section anyway.

I never thought I would defend obstetrics, but I'm getting a little exasperated by the endless onslaught of how everyone wants to play doctor but nobody wants the gut-churning responsibility or endless tedium of decades of dead boring (and often highly questionable in terms of utility) science.
posted by hobo gitano de queretaro at 7:43 AM on December 6, 2013 [4 favorites]

But as a solution to a problem we don't have, this isn't even new or useful.

Becton Dickinson & Co (a gigantic medical device company) has already signed on to manufacture it. It's going through the regulatory approval process already. Between the doctors in the article and that company, I'm going to say that quite a few experts seem to think it will be new and useful enough to warrant the considerable expense of manufacture and multi-national regulatory approval.

none of these trial runs were in difficult deliveries.

The device was tested for safety in ordinary deliveries. If something went wrong it would be much easier to tell that it was the fault of the device rather than something that was likely to go wrong anyway. From the article: "The next phase of the study will see it tested in problem births in Africa, Asia and Europe."

This is very similar to pharmaceutical testing, where it's typical for the phase I (safety) study to be in healthy patients. The next phase tests for efficacy.
posted by jedicus at 8:42 AM on December 6, 2013 [2 favorites]

I'm not very qualified to speak on this topic

Clearly.
posted by ninebelow at 8:51 AM on December 6, 2013 [2 favorites]

But as a solution to a problem we don't have, this isn't even new or useful.

Yeah, but:

The experts could see the potential for this cheap and simple device in developing countries, where prolonged or obstructed births are often fatal.

and:

Schvartzman says the most important thing is that the Odon device is easy to use - it could potentially be used by a midwife without a doctor present. It also reduces the risk of transmission from mother to baby of infections such as HIV. And, in developed countries, it could help bring down soaring rates of Caesarean births.

It's not really about the US system (with the possible exception of helping bring down Caesarean rates, which... is a whole other debate), but about labour and birth in parts of the world where most women's situations are very different.
posted by Catseye at 8:56 AM on December 6, 2013 [6 favorites]

Welp. I *was* hungry for lunch.
posted by Mooseli at 9:04 AM on December 6, 2013

Also the result of forceps delivery: Martin Sheen's wonky shoulder, which brought us the famous "Bartlet maneuver" for putting on a jacket.
posted by sonika at 10:26 AM on December 6, 2013 [3 favorites]

The standards for testing medical devices are far lower than those for testing pharmaceuticals.

This would fall under a class I medical device, hand held surgical instrument, with no required testing since --it is after all "substantially equivalent to an existing device."

The HIV infection rate bit is based on the length of the labor, that statement would be equally true for any other device used. It's nonsensical anyway, as that is not the standard of care or even remotely clinically significant.

Those labors are prolonged or difficult will still result in significant mortality for the mothers, as this device does not fix any of the most common or most severe issues.

"It is not likely to replace the forceps or the vacuum extractor, but it has the potential to be cheaper, safer and simpler to use, meaning that it can be used in many clinical situations, environments and by lower levels of health workers where forceps or vacuum would be unsafe or unavailable" - Justus Hofmeyr, Frere Maternity Hospital, South Africa


That's from the team that tested and developed the device for the WHO. There's more quotes clearly stating the device is only to be used in the most rural of areas that do not have the personnel or infrastructure to deliver anything remotely approaching the standard of care.

I agree with that disclaimer completely, and I stand by my original statement.
posted by hobo gitano de queretaro at 10:55 AM on December 6, 2013

This wouldn't [...] prevent them from breathing?

Not any more than being inside another person would. Babies breathe through their bellybuttons when they're in there.
posted by Sys Rq at 11:08 AM on December 6, 2013 [1 favorite]

This is the stupidest thing I've ever seen. Sure, introduce a foreign object directly into the womb during labour, for poor women in rural areas without resources such as electricity or running water and a lack of drugs to combat sepsis. An actual murder machine.

Sure midwives hate it - wow, it must be that they fear for their status.
posted by glasseyes at 4:53 PM on December 6, 2013

If you want to make labor and delivery easier, my first move would be to stop trying to fight gravity

This. "Researchers concluded that upright positions were more efficient than non-upright positions, as evidenced by the decreased risk of vacuum-assisted delivery, forceps use, and episiotomy."
posted by billiebee at 6:21 PM on December 6, 2013

This is the stupidest thing I've ever seen. Sure, introduce a foreign object directly into the womb during labour, for poor women in rural areas without resources such as electricity or running water and a lack of drugs to combat sepsis. An actual murder machine.

Fine. Leave the baby in the birth canal. No one ever dies that way!
posted by Sys Rq at 8:48 PM on December 6, 2013