Old wives’ tales are possibly as old as language itself. They are a vital part of our cultural history and ancestry originating long time before ballpoint and ink, textbooks and motion pictures, and undoubtedly prior to the Web. Why do we hold on to those old wives’ tales about common condition and also the health when we live in a world rich with medical know-how-knowledge as well as successful treatments & cures?

A lot of maybe have survived all through the ages because they offer reassuring advice concerning experiences we all share, have little control over, plus oftentimes worry about, e.g. childbirth and also illness.

Various old wives’ tales, especially those surrounding pregnancy & childbirth, are proven false or irrelevant by progress in medicine and equipment. One illustration is the use of prenatal ultrasound screening to discover the sex of the child as an alternative of dangling a ring balanced on top of a string over the pregnant woman’s belly. Based on the tale, if the ring swings from side to side, it is a baby girl, and when it swings in a circle, it is a boy. An ultrasound reading might not be as much cool, but the test results are absolutely more accurate.

Several tales concerning condition & sickness have several basis in fact, while some other, newer ones appear to reproduce a kind of technophobia, such as those associated to watching TV. Despite the fact that some tales about pregnancy are right, most are safe.

If the fetal heart rate is under a hundred and forty beats per minute (BPM), it’s a baby boy?

False. A baby girl’s heart rate is frequently faster in comparison to a boy’s, although only after the beginning of labor. There’s no difference between fetal heart rates for baby boys and girls, however the rate does change with the age of the unborn baby. By approximately the fifth week of being pregnant, the fetal heart rate is near the mom’s — about eighty to eighty five beats per minute. It continues to speed up until early in the ninth week, at what time it reaches one hundred seventy to two hundred beats per minute and then decelerates to an average of 120 to one hundred sixty BPM by the middle of the gestation period. Normal fetal heart rate at some stage in labor ranges from a hundred and twenty to 160 BPM for boys and baby girls.