In my view weighing babies in the health services is a clinical intervention, on a par with installing a clock on the wall of the labor room.  It is not a treatment, but it is an intervention.  Sheila Kitzinger claims that the use of clocks (and partographs, which need a clock to be 'meaningful') is the most far-reaching, pervasive interference in normal labor, ever.  Weighing babies may not be quite on that level, but using a scale appropriately to monitor infant weight is a high-level skill.  Whether or not you need a special certification to buy the equipment is not what defines whether using a tool is an intervention.  Syringes and needles are a case in point - don't know what the rules are in the US, but here they are freely available to anyone who wants to buy them at pharmacies.  I'm not aware of there being an age limit.  No one would argue that giving injections is not an intervention, but you can use syringes for non-clinical reasons too, just as you can use scales to tell you whether you should buy the next size disposable diaper or not (as if you can't tell when one size is getting too small, but we are a gadget-fixated people), or whether you may be charged extra when you check your suitcase at the airport.  Nobody in Norway acquires an infant scale for home weighing but nearly everyone has a scale in their kitchen because we weigh flour rather than measuring it by volume when we bake.  A lot of people weigh their babies on the kitchen scales, if only out of curiosity.  When you weigh a baby as part of an assessment of a feeding problem, to my mind it is one of several interventions normally carried out on such an occasion.  
An intervention is something that intervenes, comes between.  Scales definitely do that, as far as I can tell.

Magda Sachs' PhD dissertation on mothers's experiences of routine weighing of healthy breastfed babies at health centers is worth reading.  It is not a call to arms, nor does it address anything to do with weighing babies in the context of BF consultations for problems.  It is an ethnographic study of this particular intervention as mothers perceive it, and it is eye-opening.

Rachel Myr
Kristiansand, Norway

             ***********************************************

Archives: http://community.lsoft.com/archives/LACTNET.html
To reach list owners: [log in to unmask]
Mail all list management commands to: [log in to unmask]
COMMANDS:
1. To temporarily stop your subscription write in the body of an email: set lactnet nomail
2. To start it again: set lactnet mail
3. To unsubscribe: unsubscribe lactnet
4. To get a comprehensive list of rules and directions: get lactnet welcome