What is a birthing ball used for?
A birthing ball can help ease labour pain, reduce the pain of contractions (especially if you use it for a couple of months before you give birth), decrease anxiety and shorten the first stage of labour.
Using a birthing ball can also help you adopt different upright positions, which can help you to labour effectively. It may even shorten your labour by an hour or so. https://www.sthk.nhs.uk/media/.leaflets/60795437eed0f2.81485321.pdf
The birth ball, also called fitball or swiss ball, is a large ball commonly with a diameter of 55 cm or 65 cm. It provides a soft surface for women to sit on or lean against while carrying out simple exercises. Birth ball exercises can directly relieve women’s physical pain by improving pelvic dimensions, mobility and foetal positioning 5,6,7. Concurrently, women’s psychosocial wellbeing can be enhanced when they take an active role in their own care, thereby promoting a sense of control over their care and body postures, balance and coordination.
Results: Four RCTs involving 220 women were included in the systematic review. One study was excluded from the meta-analysis because of heterogeneous interventions and a lack of mean and standard deviation results of labor pain score. The meta-analysis showed that birth ball exercises provided statistically significant improvements to labor pain (pooled mean difference -0.921; 95% confidence interval -1.28, -0.56; P = 0.0000005; I(2) = 33.7%).
Conclusion: The clinical implementation of a birth ball exercise could be an effective tool for parturient women to reduce labor pain. However, rigorous RCTs are needed to evaluate the effect of the birth ball on labor pain relief. https://bmcpregnancychildbirth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12884-019-2305-8
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26419499/
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