Maureen, when the research in question is designed to examine a phenomenon seen daily in many sertings in the US and likely a lot of other places, is carried out according to the governing rules and ethical scrutiny in place, using participants who freely volunteer after considering the information abput what participation entails, in a reasonably fumctioning democracy with a fairly free press, it's impossible for me not to protest at your calling it a crime of violence. The mothers are not prisoners or slaves. They would likely experience the same care with or without the research context. Until we have heard from the authors what the advice on soothing was, we can assume nothing about its effect on feeding frequency because we don't know. It may be that all your worst suspicions will be confirmed, in which case we need to hear about it, but until then it is uncalled for to accuse them of assault. Sarah, I don't believe it is customary for authors of journal articles to be paid on publication. Their income is only indirectly tied to publication, because if they never get anything published, their funding dries up. But whatever the journal charges for access to full text of articles, none of it goes into the authors' pockets. I maintain that the most interesting thing about the article in question is its wide dissemination despite its small size. The fact that statistical significance was achieved for the difference in prevalence of exclusive or any bf betwwen the groups is not evidence that the intervention was the determining factor. It merely means that there are strong odds the differences were not due to chance. Not the same thing. I think the confounders such as parity and mean gestational age of the babies are two prime confounders, i.e. factors influencing the outcome but not controlled for through the randomization process. The differences in bf rates were dramatic but the differences in gestational age and in proportions of primiparas were not. Things can be highly clinically relevant even when they are not statistically significant, and the smaller the 'n', the more likely it is that a confounder will confound the results. Valerie Flaherman is easily approachable and she is no enemy of breastfeeding, far from it. The more feedback she gets with constructive criticism of this study, the better her future research will be. I'm a staunch advocate of judging research articles after reading the full text, and of resisting the temptation to condemn them based on reading the abstract, or, heaven forbid, a mass media version of a press release based on someone else's grasp of the abstract. Rachel Myr, Kristiansand *********************************************** Archives: http://community.lsoft.com/archives/LACTNET.html To reach list owners: [log in to unmask] Mail all list management commands to: [log in to unmask] COMMANDS: 1. To temporarily stop your subscription write in the body of an email: set lactnet nomail 2. To start it again: set lactnet mail 3. To unsubscribe: unsubscribe lactnet 4. To get a comprehensive list of rules and directions: get lactnet welcome