Breech presentation is where a baby’s bottom or their feet are pointing downwards during pregnancy. They will normally turn themselves into the head-down position by 37 weeks. If not, it’s normally managed by interventions like external cephalic version or maybe a c-section birth. This is where traditional Chinese medicine comes in. One treatment option that has long been used in traditional Chinese medicine for breech presentation is moxibustion.

Moxibustion is where a specific herb is aged and prepared to produce sticks that can be burned and used to heat particular acupuncture points on the body to get a therapeutic effect. According to traditional Chinese medical theory, by treating someone the correct way with moxibustion, you can help to turn a breech baby. The best part (in my opinion) is that a Cochrane systematic review is carried out to see if there is any evidence that this actually works. A Cochrane systematic review is a high-quality analysis which assesses the research for quality and for issues such as bias. The Cochrane review that was carried out on the use of moxibustion to turn a breech baby found moderate certainty evidence that moxibustion plus usual care probably reduces the chance of non-cephalic presentation at birth. This is kind of the headline, which I think is amazing. They also point out uncertainty about the need for external cephalic version, that it probably reduces the use of oxytocin during labour, and also that it probably doesn’t change the rate of C-section.

A major criticism that I hear about traditional Chinese medicine is that there hasn’t been enough high-quality research done to assess how effective it really is for different conditions. That’s a valid point. For example, when you consider how difficult and expensive most medical research is, it makes sense. There isn’t any big traditional Chinese medical corporation that can afford to pay millions in R&D. But despite this, higher-quality research is slowly coming through. And seeing a Cochrane review on something like this is really exciting as a TCM practitioner. Click here for the link to the Cochrane review.