Help with some research and evidence

Hi all,

A colleague of mine and myself are working on an assignment looking at the role Chinese Medicine can play with care during pregnancy.

What we are looking for is some stats and evidence about 'disorders during pregnancy' in regards to how an obstetrics model would treat these disorders, and how a midwifery/women-centred model would treat them.

We are actually wanting actual evidence/research with cited references - opinions are great, but we need to be able to give some kind of credible reference back to it - and no, Wikipedia is not considered a scholarly reference.

The 'disorders' are many: we are obviously looking at things like morning sickness, leg cramps, discharge, oedema, hypertension, pre-eclampsia/eclampsia, gestational diabetes, breech, malposition, threatened miscarriage, and so on and so forth.

What we would also like is some real case studies (past or present), especially if there was an obstetric/medical opinion/treatment (whether received or not), and/or midwife opinion/treatment; this would include details of signs/symptoms etc. We would be happy to communicate directly with those individuals in private (of course) so we could work something out.

Of course, we will publish both our power-point presentation and the written paper here (if kelly permits...) so you can all read it. The presentation at least is promising to be entertaining and fun as well as succinct and informative (the paper is just a 3000 word version of the presentation).

So if there is anyone out there who can help, please reply or send me a private message. We need to get onto this pretty much now, and have only a couple of weeks to compile our info before handing it in.

Any questions as to what evidence/research we require, please contact me/reply and I'll let you know.

Something I can say now:

I'd like the reference to where the evidence shows that Homebirths are statistically safer than c-sections (research came out last year, or early this year? - American study I think)

The stats for birthing outcomes in Victoria (Private vs Public hospital vs Homebirth), the Caesarian stats, the stats for women diagnosed with Gest.Diab., stats for Breech (successful birth of, etc),

References to any stat/evidence showing that midwifery-led care is better than Obstetric care (or vice versa of course - I want the evidence, not the opinion).

I would preferably love Victorian/Australian stats, and preferably references that aren't too old (anything after 2000 preferable, after 2005 is even better).

Hope this is a good start, more info and requests coming your way as soon as we come up with it.....

Thanks all in advabnce for your help. I'm hoping all you wonderful Birth-nuts can help out with this.....:D

mitakuye oyasin,
Peter L