Diane W. - I like your "dumbo feather" analogy; I guess when I think about the questions you pose, I come back to the same thing I always come up with: people are different, and they need different approaches and styles, and sometimes what works for someone is exactly opposite what works for others. No Duh - I guess we note that often enough on lactnet! So that's where the art and the skill of lactation counseling come in; we don't just have to know really a lot about breasts and babies and all that stuff, we need to be just about super-humanly sensitive to the people we talk to. I guess for me this is, as my sister says, "the hill I'll die on" - the Cause, the Quest, the Mission, whatever you'd call it; it's not just about breastfeeding facts, it's about the ways that different people need different things. So YOU don't need to "know what to think" about breast shells (or any other gizmo, gadget, etc.), exactly - you need *exactly* what you are already doing: to know enough about them and the pros and cons and the appropriate & not-appropriate possible uses etc. that you can share that info with folks & let them decide. Does that make one wishy-washy? I don't think so - I prefer to think of it as flexibility. Cathy Bargar, RN, IBCLC, Ithaca NY