This doctor gets women dancing when they go into labour

Labour can be one of the most excruciating things a woman will experience – but this doctor relieves his patient's labour pains by dancing with them.

Dr Fernando Guedes da Cunha, from Brazil, claims that dancing helps his patients relax and makes giving birth much easier, reports The Sun.

The gynaecologist first went viral back in August last year when a video on Facebook showed the ‘dancing doc’ and a mom-to-be swaying their hips to the hit song Despacito in a local Brazilian hospital. 

"Dancing, walking, activities with physiotherapy ball and squats, are part of the patient's verticalisation, which greatly favours labour,” the post was captioned. “Increasingly we are trying to implement humanised measures to improve care for pregnant women.”

Dr Fernando, whose favourite moves are squats, hip movements and shoulder shimmies, has also shared an array of dance videos on Instagram with his more than 35 000 followers.

Labour can last for hours, but a study in the New England Journal of Medicine has found that women who move may give birth faster.

“The baby needs to move through the birth canal, so when mom is moving, she is assisting her baby to move through the birth canal structures as well,” Regina Kaplan, an obstetrician gynaecologist at New Jersey’s Overlook Medical Center told Glamour Magazine

“It will help shift the pressure of the baby pressing on maternal skeletal structures and organs.”

Sources: thesun.co.uk, mirror.co.uk, dailymail.co.uk