I have heard one ENT specialist claim that there is a significant risk of
destroying the outlets of the sublingual salivary ducts when clipping an
infant's frenulum. He said he had just come back from an international
conference for ENT doctors, in Iceland, and this was the content of a paper
presented there. I asked him on the spot for the author's name, and he could
not provide it. I sent him everything I had on tongue tie and BF by e-mail
in .pdf format, and asked again for an author name or title of the paper. He
never even acknowledged receiving my e-mail and he continues to refuse to
fix tongue ties. He is the same person who said we should wait 2 or 3 months
'and see if a breastfeeding problem developed'.  Nicest way I can put it is
to say that we are not on the same page.

For me it was a turning point when I got our head of pediatrics to take
another look at his attitude to tongue tie, which was 'a remnant from the
bad old days - nobody cuts them anymore, it's a myth that they even matter'.
 Thirty years ago, I have been told by older colleagues, the pediatricians
would snip ALL the frenulums every morning when they examined the babies who
had been born since the previous morning. The mothers were never present for
these exams.  I doubt they recorded what they did and I doubt that the
mothers ever found out, so a lot of people having babies now are surprised
to find themselves dealing with tongue tie. They simply do not know that the
baby inherited it from them. Obviously we're not in such a bad way that
every baby needs surgical modification in order to survive. I don't know
what made the practice stop, and I am curious. 

Now I am working on the same head of peds, about manual therapy, esp CST but
also general osteopathy, chiropractic and even mainstream PT, to treat
babies with breastfeeding problems. Again, it makes my job difficult that
there are some CST practitioners who see the need for such treatment in
every baby they have ever laid eyes on and usually in the parents as well,
even if one allows for the possibility that this is the case. It really
makes it difficult that there is so little published research on manual
therapy and all the rest of it. I'm not advocating hiring a CST who could
make rounds twice a day on the post partum ward, but I do expect to be taken
seriously when I present him with a modest list of babies who only ended up
breastfed because their parents took them for CST at my suggestion. MDs are
generally sceptical, like the GP who pooh-poohed the idea of trying CST for
a 19 day old baby who was physically unable to open her mouth wide enough to
get hold of the breast.  She had not suckled in all those 19 days, but the
doctor assured the parents it was a bad idea to go for CST because 'this
will straighten itself out'.  I wish they had asked him, when? and how? And
oh, how are we supposed to get food into her while we wait?  I don't know
what they decided to do in the end.

Rachel Myr
Kristiansand, Norway

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