Happy 2nd trimester ladies. I'm 21 weeks now and expecting a girl! I see many of you have had the dreaded headaches. For 4 weeks I had non-stop headaches day and night to the point it was affecting my vision. I am a nurse and in the middle of completing my degree in prescribing so have been studying pharmacology closely. Surprisingly paracetamol is still a drug that is not well understood and clinical trials are not performed on pregnant women for ethical reasons. Due to this lack of evidence I have avoided taking paracetamol. I did however find that a small amount of caffeine seems to help when I have a headache. Before being pregnant I didn't drink caffeine at all but now find a cup of caffeine tea seems to ease the feeling of pressure. I wonder if anyone else has found this helpful?
Congratulations - another April girlie!
Oh my days, I'm glad we have someone here in the know. I find all sorts of things come up like that about drugs in pregnancy and when breastfeeding - you're led to believe something is safe but when you look into it there haven't been any sufficient studies to support the definitive advice and our health professionals are supposed to be following evidence based practice pffft!
When I developed PND with my first I found that while the midwives were saying certain antidepressants were safe, the only studies that had been carried out were old, with relatively small test pools, and there had been no long term studies on the behavioral outcomes in infants. This was therefore a factor in my decision to switch to formula. That's not to say anyone who continues to breast feed while taking for example Sertaline is doing anything wrong, just that it annoyed me that the risks and benefits weren't explained to me fully and I had to search for information myself.