Taking Medicines in Pregnancy: What’s Safe and What’s Not - What The Experts Say

Ever since the Thalidomide tragedy half a century ago, pregnant women have, too often, been given conflicting and often confusing advice from friends or from distorted media reports as to the safety of various chemicals and medicines. Often such medicines may be recommended for treating medical conditions that they have, such as epilepsy, high blood pressure or diabetes.
The author, Ron Batagol, is a pharmacy and obstetric drug information consultant, who, over many years, has researched, lectured and written several Reference Guides on the safety of drug in pregnancy for doctors, pharmacists and other health professionals.
This book is a must-read for pregnant women who want to be informed of any risks that we know of, to the unborn infant, as against the benefits to the mother’s health, of medicines which may be used to treat their various medical conditions. The information, reflecting the expert consensus of what the risk versus benefit is for each medicine, will help pregnant women when seeking the advice of the doctor, about whether or to take the medicine during pregnancy.
Ron sees this book as fulfilling an important educative role, by providing for the first time, information on medication safety directly to pregnant women themselves, in an easily-readable, plain English form, in a way that reflects the consensus of expert obstetric opinion with regard to the safety of various medicines. The book deals separately with the components of all of the commonly-used medicines. It also includes a general discussion of how we assess the safety of medicines used during pregnancy and discusses the safety of herbal and other non-prescription medicines, Ron also discusses the safety issues of exposure to recreational or environmental chemicals during pregnancy, and the dangers of smoking and excessive alcohol use, whilst cautioning against unnecessarily scaring women who may have occasionally or inadvertently had small amounts of alcohol during pregnancy.