Relieving Pressure & Pain

The women leaning back in large loungechairs are enclosed from the chest down by a plastic balloon. To the casual observer, they look like a cross between customers at a beauty parlor and weight watchers at a reducing salon.

But the gleaming new London quarters in which they are paying customers is neither. The women are pregnant patients preparing for relatively painless childbirth. The key to their goal is contained in equipment they are using and the title of the building in Knightsbridge where they gather at least once a week:

the Decompression Clinic.

Opened this month, the clinic employs a technique developed in the mid-1950s by Professor Ockert S. Heyns (pronounced Haynes), 61, of the Uni versity of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. Heyns, seeking means of relaxing and stretching abdominal muscles during labor to reduce the pain of childbirth, hit upon the notion that a reduction of atmospheric pressure outside the abdomen might help. According to him, a woman's uterus pushes forward and changes shape from oval to nearly spherical during labor contractions. But often, he explains, the muscles of the abdominal wall interfere with this transformation, causing pain and prolonging birth.

By reducing exterior pressure on the abdominal wall, Heyns hoped to allow it to protrude further, accommodating the changing shape of the womb. He and his colleagues put together a crude decompression device, tried it out on several expectant mothers. Sure enough, it produced a dramatic shortening in the duration of labor, reduced discomfort, and brought the women who submitted to the tests into the final stages of birth in a more relaxed and vigorous state. Word of the boon soon spread.

Broadening the Benefits. Refined and streamlined, Heyns's decompression unit now consists of a tent or bag of plastic supported by a barrel-shaped glass-fiber frame. The zippered bag encases the woman from the armpits down. As the pregnant mother relaxes in a chair, a hose attached to the frame draws air out of the enclosure, reducing air pressure on the abdomen by as much as 3 Ibs. per square inch. Normal pressure within the abdomen remains constant, pushing out the abdominal muscle as decompression outside increases.

At first, Heyns's decompression unit was only used during labor. But evidence of more widespread benefits to mother and child have led to sequential applications of the device from about the 18th week of pregnancy onward. For the mother, says Heyns, decompression sessions encourage painless uterine contractions that may enhance pre-and postnatal development in the child. Evidence also indicates that the technique lowers the incidence of toxemia--a largely unexplained complication of pregnancy, which can be serious.

Better than Normal. For the child, the benefits of decompression seem even more significant. Children born after a course of decompression during pregnancy appear to develop faster, both physically and mentally. Heyns is understandably tentative about such results. But he believes that decompression improves the circulation of blood--and therefore oxygen--from mother to fetus, giving it a developmental advantage over a child born after a normal, unaided pregnancy.

So far, it has not been possible to prove the benefits to babies beyond the shadow of a doubt. But studies seem to bear out his belief. South African babies born after prenatal decompression have scored, on the average, about 18% higher than normally born South African white children in tests based on the landmarks of infant development mapped out by Child Psychologist Arnold Gesell. In one group of decompression babies, 16% scored at least 48% higher. At their first birthdays, six specially watched infants who had had the benefit of decompression during gestation and birth appeared to be as developed physically and behaviorally as normal two-year-olds.

Since 1955, more than 5,000 South African births have been aided at six de compression clinics using Heyns's method. Another clinic is operating in Mexico City, and some 36 national health hospitals in Great Britain have used the device for problem pregnancies and research.

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