Susan Burton

And then there are solutions that revolve around communication, too.

What can be done to help doctors listen to patients?

And what can be done to make it possible for patients to speak up about their pain?

I spent some time talking to a doctor in Chicago who had come up with essentially a system to make sure that this happens.

Doctors at her hospital ask patients about their pain at regular intervals during the C-section.

And that gets doctors to pay attention to pain.

And it also gives a patient an opportunity to speak up.

Yeah, talk to the patients more, but also give doctors and patients a system that helps doctors listen and helps patients speak up.

Yeah, I mean, I think that's a really critical question.

And the answer to it is really individual.

Pain is really subjective.

We all have different tolerances.

I think it points to something else, too, that came up in my reporting.

I would ask people, you know, why does this happen?

And one of the things we would talk about is we expect women to suffer during childbirth.

We expect them to be in pain.

C-sections are birth, but they are also major abdominal surgeries.

And surgical pain is very different from the pain one experiences during a vaginal birth and has this assumption that women will suffer during childbirth allowed us to rationalize the pain of C-sections.

And when I say this, I actually don't just mean doctors, right?

I mean patients, too.