Nutritional diet to induce labor

Currently, there is no clinically proven safe and effective "nutritional diet induction" program in the world. All claims that induction of labor/termination of pregnancy can be achieved by eating specific ordinary foods and dietary prescriptions are all pseudoscience. Self-attempts can lead to bleeding and infection, uterine rupture, massive bleeding, or even life-threatening. Induction of labor is a medical operation with clear qualification requirements and must be completed by professional medical care in a regular medical institution. There is no shortcut.

When I was rotating in the obstetric emergency department two years ago, I met a 21-year-old girl in the middle of the night. When her roommate helped her in, her jeans were all stained red. She was squatting on the ground and couldn't stand up. After asking about the situation, I found out that I was unexpectedly pregnant for 11 weeks. I didn’t dare to tell my parents and was afraid of meeting acquaintances in the hospital. I watched a short video and saw someone saying, “Drinking iced barley + raw hawthorn water for three days will make the pregnancy fall off naturally.” I actually drank it according to the prescription for three days. I started to have stomach pain in the afternoon of the third day. I endured the pain until I almost fainted in the middle of the night before I dared to come. The final checkup showed an incomplete miscarriage with massive bleeding, and the remains in the uterine cavity were stuck in the internal opening and the uterus was contracting. An emergency uterine evacuation was performed, but later due to infection, it was cleared a second time. Before leaving, she asked me if I didn't drink enough. I made a calculation for her: To reach the blood concentration of hawthorn flavonoids that can induce contractions in hawthorn, you have to eat 40 kilograms of fresh hawthorn at one time. Before contractions come, your stomach will be pierced by acid.

In fact, many people will believe this. Either they are afraid of privacy leaks and want to solve the problem secretly, or they want to start it naturally after the due date and do not want to use medical intervention such as oxytocin, so they place their hopes on the method of "eating something can solve it". I also met a pregnant mother who was over 41 weeks old. Her mother-in-law said that eating hairy crabs can "facilitate pregnancy". She ate three cold ones in a row, but the baby didn't move. She had diarrhea for two days and was dehydrated and had to stay in the hospital for two days to recover.

Regarding the so-called "diet to induce labor", the consensus in different fields is actually very unified: Western medicine is clear that the content of active ingredients in ordinary food is extremely low and cannot reach the dose to induce effective uterine contractions. Even the castor oil scrambled eggs that were occasionally used to induce labor for full-term pregnant women in the early years have long been eliminated clinically because they can easily cause tonic uterine contractions, fetal hypoxia, and uterine rupture. Moreover, it can only be used under full fetal heart rate monitoring in the hospital, and it is definitely not something you eat at home. In the diagnosis and treatment guidelines of regular Chinese medicine, there is never a plan for "consuming ordinary food to terminate pregnancy." The statement "barley, crab, and hawthorn to prevent pregnancy" spread on the Internet is essentially a misunderstanding of dietary taboos during pregnancy - excessive consumption of these foods during pregnancy may increase the risk of bleeding, and it is impossible to completely eliminate pregnancy tissue.

Don’t believe those online who sell “scented labor tea” and “abortion diet packs”. Last year, we had a patient who spent 800 yuan to buy a “natural abortion tea” sold by a micro-commerce company. After drinking it for a week, she suffered from nausea and vomiting, and her liver function was damaged. The gestational sac did not move at all. Finally, she went to the gastroenterology department to save her liver for a week before having an abortion. The cost was five or six times that of a regular medical abortion.

Many people are afraid of going to the hospital, simply because they are afraid of privacy leakage, fear of pain, and fear of spending money. However, now the family planning clinics in regular public hospitals all provide one-on-one diagnosis and treatment, and privacy protection is very strict. The cost of medical abortion in early pregnancy is only more than 1,000, which is much more cost-effective than trying blindly to take folk remedies and go to rescue if something goes wrong in the end. If you are in the third trimester of pregnancy and want to induce labor after the due date, go to the hospital to do a B-ultrasound to check the placenta, amniotic fluid, and fetal heart rate monitoring. If there is no problem, just take a walk or sit on the birthing ball. If you really need to induce labor, the doctor will put a cervical balloon or use low-dose oxytocin according to your situation. The whole process will be monitored, which is 10,000 times safer than eating strange things.

One last word: Whether you want to terminate a pregnancy or induce labor in the third trimester, don’t gamble with your body on folk remedies. The posts you see on the Internet about “successfully inducing labor after drinking barley water for three days” are either made up by scammers, or they happened to have a spontaneous abortion. If you really follow their example, the cost of losing the bet may be your lifetime fertility, or even your life.