Importance and methods of treating pregnancy constipation in conventional medicine and comparison with traditional medicine

Constipation is one of the most common complaints during pregnancy that significant percentage of pregnant women experience the onset or worsening of it during pregnancy. In this article, recommendations for constipation treatment during pregnancy were extracted from traditional medicine resources and conventional medicine databases and were compared.
In this review and library study, the recommendations related to pregnancy constipation were extracted from important textbooks of traditional medicine. Then, Persian and English articles of databases including Google scholar, Pubmed, Scopus, SID, Iranmed and Magiran were searched using the keywords of pregnancy, constipation, and the combination of two words and their equivalents in Persian with no time limitation. The results which were found in first stage obtained from traditional medicine sources were compared with the results which were obtained from the articles.
In Iranian traditional medicine, it is believed that constipation treatment and using of laxative if needed during pregnancy can reduce many of the pregnancy complications. Recommendations related to pregnancy constipation in Iranian traditional medicine textbooks included: nutritional recommendations such as eating fatty soups, medicinal recommendations such as Cassia fistula and Rosa damascene, non-nutritional recommendations such as mild walking and enema, and contraindications and cautions such as avoidance of spicy, bitter and astringent foods. In conventional medicine similar to traditional medicine, first-line treatment for pregnancy constipation is diet and lifestyle change, and medication use is prohibited as much as possible.
The general approach for treatment of pregnancy constipation in traditional medicine resources is similar to conventional medicine, but the details of recommendations in traditional medicine resources didn’t have desirable level of evidences. Also, importance of constipation treatment during pregnancy is emphasized in traditional medicine resources that is worthy to do more studies in this field.