Speaking of Code non-compliance, I had the non-pleasure of reading the Norwegian text on the Medela Calma bottle yesterday at a pharmacy, and was astonished to see that they described a baby's drinking activity from the bottle as 'breastfeeding', not as sucking. and they used the verb for breastfeeding that only refers to what a lactating mother does, as in 'babies breastfeed at their own pace'.  Well, um, I guess so, which would be a very slow pace since babies have neither lactating breasts nor infants to suckle at them.  We have a completely different verb in Norwegian to describe the baby's activity at the breast, and that verb is also inappropriate except to describe a baby actually drinking from a breast, though having a shield on does not preclude the use of the word.  They suck on bottles or drink from them, and suckle at the breast.  

Of course Medela included on the package a bit about how 'their' research shows how babies remove milk from the breast, which is all down to extraction by suction, since they play down the role of peristaltic tongue movements.  Well, the competition are alive and kicking.  At the MAINN conference last month in Grange-over-Sands, Mike Woolridge showed new video footage of his own brand new ultrasound studies of babies suckling at the breast and did not find a single instance of a feed in which peristaltic tongue movements were absent during milk transfer.  This conference has no commercial exhibits from anyone selling anything except books, which is one reason I like to attend it.   The two Medela reps at this conference were paying participants and I am ashamed to say I was too flabbergasted to even comment when both of these IBCLCs apparently recorded Mike's entire keynote lecture using their Blackberries.  It was so rude I simply had no words, even though I was sitting right next to them.  This was of course professionally sleazy beyond belief, because they had not asked Mike's or the organizer's permission to do so beforehand, though Mike was not surprised to learn they had done so.  

Mike's take-home message was that if you take vacuum to be the all-important factor in milk transfer, you will categorize milk transfer problems as coming from too much or too little vacuum and you will treat too little vacuum with a pump, and too much vacuum with a shield on the breast and a pump to protect milk supply, whereas if you consider peristaltic tongue movements to have a key role in milk transfer, you will be concerned with good positioning and attachment at the breast.  This is exactly why some of us find it so problematic that the main center researching how babies transfer milk, has such close ties to a company that sells shields, pumps and bottles.  Mike Woolridge is well aware that the entity who offered him funding to do these new studies, Philips, owner of Avent, has a vested interest in taking Medela down a few pegs, but unless they develop a machine in which peristaltic tongue movements and jaw compression are replicated, they won't have any sales advantage.  Apart from disclosing his funding he didn't say anything about them.  He did acknowledge the ground-breaking work done by Hartmann and the rest of the group in Perth.

Rachel Myr
Kristiansand, Norway

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