In response to Linda Roselli's questions about how littel LCs make, and
whether this is still true.  It depends...

The more you work to build a practice, the faster it will build.  I looked
into this sort of thing when writing the work strategies chapter in
Riordan/Auerbach book and it does contain some information that may place
some of your concerns in perspective.  In the US in the early 1990's it was
taking about 3 years for someone in private practice to start making a
profit.  How much of one was quite variable.

This is NOT a profession that is designed to make one rich in a short time.
 You may hear about someone who has a gazillion pumps and makes
$100,000+/year, but you do not know if that is gross or net and probably is
NOT net, what with all the work it would take to run so many pumps wtihout
doing ANY regular consults.

Ours is a time-intensive work.  If you are not interested in taking risks,
DO NOT GO INTO PRIVATE PRACTICE>  This is one of the strong messages that
we shared at our Private Practice LC workshop which was held in 1995.  I
suspect it will come up again in our 1996 offering on the same topic.
(Write me private for more info on that).

Many of us give a lot of time/advice/help away for free because we care
about mothers more than we care about money.  If you only want to make
money, do something else that requires a lot less work with far higher
remuneration. I consider my work as a private practice LC to be a "labor of
love" as much as anything else.  Does it pay me?  Yes.  Very much? No.  I
do not have a husband to support me, so what I make is what I live on and
my private pracitde is NOT sufficient to sustain me.  But... I would not
trade it for a million bucks and the hassles of managing that!

How do other LCs feel?




Def. of LC service: "We are all faced with a series of great opportunities
brilliantly disguised as impossible situations."
Kathleen G. Auerbach,PhD, IBCLC (Homewood, IL)- [log in to unmask]
WEB PAGE: http://www.mcs.com/~auerbach/lactation.html