Alicia Dermer and Linda Pohl, I *loved* your posts about informing mothers
about the dangers of artifical milk being interpreted as "pressure to
breastfeed."  Well said.

I unsubscribed for several days, but couldn't stand being away.


>I would like for someone to explain to me just what is so bad about making
>this kind of change. Exactly what is absolutely going to happen?


With many of the block grant programs, the federal money was tied to how
many people who served/what the need was, but the block grants (in some
instances) will be static amounts of money that won't change over the years,
regardless of whether the needs go up or down.

Why do we need the federal government to set some policy decisions instead
of leaving it up to the people of each state?  So that my child in Texas
will have the same rights to public special education as your child in
California or someone else child in New Hampshire.  Our own beloved (NOT)
Texas Senator Phil Gramm thinks that federal funding for special education
should be cut severely.  If others in Texas agree with him, my child might
suffer greatly.   Also, remember the civil rights movement?  And the federal
troops that had to forcibly integrate Mississippi State?  We need some
policies at the federal level, so that schools in the south will be
integrated even though the majority of voters in Mississippi (to use one
example) want the blacks to have to stay in their own part of town.  End of
tirade on why the federal government is in a much better position than the
state governments to decide policy on many issues.  If you lived in Texas,
you would live in fear that the legislatures would have any more power.


CRANIAL/SACRAL THERAPY
RE THIS COMMENT:
 He uses the bones of the cranium and spine as "handles" to
>release restrictions in the viscera and the other soft tissues. In the
>process, the "stuck" bones (and yes, all the cranial /sacral bones have a
>movement and rhythm, and the cranial bones remain separate and moveable for a
>person's entire life, contrary to popular myth)

Folks, I just can't keep my mouth shut on this one.  It isn't a "popular
myth" that the cranial sutures fuse as a person gets older.  The bones of
the skull most certainly do fuse, and in a fairly regular order and on a
fairly regular time scale, so that "fusion of the cranial sutures" is a
pretty good way of telling the age at death of a prehistoric skeleton.  I'm
at home, not at my office, so I can't cite you specific references but any
good physical anthropology/osteology book will have a whole section on aging
an individual by looking at the skeleton, and cranial suture closure is a
standard technique (try D. Gentry Steele's human osteology text).  By the
time you get past middle-age, not only will the bones have completely fused,
but the sutures will be so obliterated by bony remodelling that you can't
even see them any more.  The suture at the base of the skull (basi-cranial
suture) closes at about 18 years of age, so that is often a criteria used
for dividing a skeletal sample into children vs. adults.  The other sutures
close in a regular and orderly fashion, beginning in the 20s, and enable you
to place people in decade categories with some certainly.  In other words, I
can't say "This person was definitely 47 when they died" but I *can* say
"This person was probably between 40 and 50 when they died, because X,Y, and
Z sutures are fused, while A,B, and C are still partly open."  There are
even different standards for using inside the skull vs. outside the skull
when looking at the sutures, but I can't remember if they fuse from the
inside out or the outside in.

I don't know diddly about cranial/sacral therapy or this doctor and his
followers -- what he does may very well work, but maybe not for the reasons
he thinks it does?  Or it may work for babies, but not for adults?

And I promised myself that if I allowed myself to sign back on I would just
read and not respond.  See?  I have absolutely no discipline when it comes
to LactNet.  I *have* to read all the posts, and I *have* to share my
opinion/knowledge.

Katherine A. Dettwyler, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Anthropology
Texas A&M University
e-mail to [log in to unmask]
(409) 845-5256
(409) 778-4513