Interestingly, what took me a while to learn is that some people seek to be empowered, while others seek to be directed. Because the "medical establishment" is such a huge hulking hyperbolic authoritative figure to some people, responses of patients can be unpredictable. Some people will rebel and thus become empowered even if they didn't intend to do so, allowing their intuition to tell them how to respond to what is best for them. Others will cower and become passive and lose their personal power altogether, and thus lose the ability to take care of themselves. Of course, ideal would be a team action with a doctor gauging response in reference to the patient gauging response to the issue at hand.

I have been both the passive and the empowered. For my first birth I became totally passive throughout the pregnancy and for me the only way to give birth ended up being with an epidural. My passivity was supported by my nervousness at being the first of all my peers to have a baby, by all the popular literature recommended to me by my conservative doctor, by my ignorance of what exactly was happening to my body and my growing fetus, and by my attempts to remain in a childless styled world.

For my second birth, I began to become empowered assisted by the empowerment "abilities" of my home midwives. They met me at my level, literally sitting at the same level in the room I interviewed them in (there were tables, chairs, cushions, and a rug - I sat down on the rug and then they followed). They approved of my parenting (nursing my toddler through my pregnancy, family bed, gentle discipline) and really made me feel I could trust them on a personal level. They offered excellent sources of natural focused literature and had an extensive library themselves to which we referred throughout the pregnancy and that was available to me. My appointments went from 1-2 hours long with extensive history recorded. They taught me how to take my own blood pressure, explained how I could measure my cervix during labor if I so wished, check my urine by myself, and they allowed me to avoid the glucose tolerance test that my personal research said was unnecessary. I could go on and on. 

So, for being unprepared the first time, the epidural was the only way to go when the "pain" got to be too much. However, thanks to these wonderful Doctors, or rather, "Senseis", my homebirth midwives, on the second time around I was much more prepared to give birth and I did not need an epidural.

My goal as a doctor is to empower those who wish to be empowered in order to heal and to offer the best possible information to those who are searching to be healed but do not yet know to whom to listen.