Pankaj Desai's Blogs

  Introduction:             Cesarean section has become the most commonly performed surgery in obstetric practice. When any procedure or technique or for that matter any drug is widely used, it is natural to look at the data to know how rational is our thinking and where has irrationality crept into our thought processes. As students of science, we seek to remain on the scientific course at all times. Therefore evidence becomes very critical for us. Undoubtedly, evidence is provided by data. Hans Rosling in his famous book Factfullness states that when in doubt look at the data. We are going to look at the data for nearly every step that we follow while performing a cesarean section and accordingly conclude. Agreed, it is impossible to cover each and every micro-aspect of the techniques involved in the surgery. However, care has been taken to include all wherein good quality data was available. Nearly all data has been genera...

  Not being high-risk does not necessarily mean one is low-risk. It is well known that amongst many parameters to identify potential subjects for developing preeclampsia, nearly all are for identifying high-risk subjects. However there is hardly any research work published that can guide us to low-risk subjects. These are the days of not stopping at identifying high-risk but actually identifying low-risk subjects of preeclampsia. Why do we need to identify the low-risk subjects also? It has been found in clinical practice long since that not being high-risk does not necessarily mean one is low-risk. There are majority of subjects who are not high-risk but are also not necessarily low-risk. As a result we all are over using prophylactic measures. Also we are scared to stop prophylaxis once a subject is labelled high-risk and is never tested again. While pregnancy is a dynamic state, it surely happens that some subjects who may be high risk initially may cease to be so as pregnan...