Liar Liar

I sat down to write this a little while ago and put it on the back burner.  And after this week, I feel like it could pretty much sum up our political arena.  But for this moment, I am going to escape that and talk about lying that happens every day all the time.  

The other night I got caught in a lie.  And it wasn’t actually a lie.  It wasn’t even my fault.  It was more along the lines of misinformation or purely perspective.  And when I got caught in a lie, I was pissed.  I was pissed because the information was given to me as fact and given to me both in training and in a book.  

The specific conversation isn’t really important, mainly because it will just sound like I am justifying myself for being wrong, or at least not right.  Instead, I will sum it up.  It was about episiotomy rates in our community.  The numbers I was given were based nationally and after researching it, I found that they were from a study done in the 70’s.  But the reason I got my information was one, when I was pregnant and there was a discussion about how our hospital has really low rates (I think around 3 percent) and some hospitals can be as high as 60 percent.  The 60 percent was from a study done 40 years ago but the point was still the same.  My local hospital was working hard at giving women a more holistic approach to child birth and were working hard at providing natural childbirths and births with less interventions.  So the information was definitely exaggerated, but it was in a way to promote healthy deliveries for both mothers and babies.  The second time I got this information was while I was going through a training to teach prenatal and postpartum women.  Now this time there was no number attached to it.  But I learned that helping women to have strong pelvic floor muscles and to do perineum massage can help prepare the body for child birth and help prevent episiotomy’s.  This time I was told that there were still a lot of unnecessary episiotomy’s.  The person I was talking to worked in the medical field and said that none of that was true.  The numbers were low everywhere.  

So this is what I got to thinking, neither of us was wrong.  If I didn’t have the information I was given, I might not put the emphasis on prevention in prenatal women.  I may not have done prevention during my own pregnancy.  

But the bigger picture became how often this happens.  How many times do I read or hear information that is only relevant to my side of the equation.  I go to trainings regularly and I don’t usually leave feeling like I need to fact check my lectures.  But at the same time, there is a lot of opinions that are mixed into the facts.  Sometimes the facts are out dated.  Sometimes facts are old and no longer relevant.  Trying to maneuver through all of that seems like a hamster running in his wheel.  Trying to figure out how many people are needed to make a study representative of a group.  All of these questions can give me a headache.  And worst they make me feel helpless in understanding truths.  

Here is what I have decided.  Me with my opinions on most things in my world.  I have decided to just embrace what works for me.  If someone says something that is based on a correct truth, I will take it.  If I thought episiotomy rates were higher nationally than they really were and because of that I was able to help a few women really work on their prenatal exercises, no harm done.  If I am told that a certain exercise can help with immobile shoulders and it gets someone doing an exercise within their movement ability and comfort zone, where is the harm.  

The harm is done when it is an end all be all truth/lie.  When that truth/lie becomes the only methodology I use.  For instance, if I say the kettlebell swing is great for people with bad backs (which is information I have gotten at numerous seminars), I can filter that information and say that for the majority of people, maybe even 90 percent of people that may be a true statement, but there are going to be people who, even with a perfect swing, end up with worse backs.  But that is because we are all different, we are not a one size fits all or even a one size fits most.  

And like I tell my classes, I am an honest liar.  I will not purposefully tell you a lie, but I cannot guarantee that everything I say has been researched in the past 12 months and has a large group of participants.  I am going to tell you what I see is right.  I am going to mix together all sorts of information and filter out the wrong and hopefully come as close to a right as I can.  That is until the right gets outdated and becomes a lie.  And then it is just time to put on some DMX and dance because most of this stuff doesn’t really matter.