Dear colleagues:
I stopped in to visit the Lactnet archives today and noticed a few posts about "benefit"-based and risk-based infant feeding rhetoric. This is a complex topic that is really hard to get a big-picture grip on. I did a large multidisciplinary review of the literature to see if there was actually an evidence base for infant feeding rhetoric. There is. I do not have anything in print yet (I'm slowly working on doing so, among other projects). When I gave the presentation this year for the first time, it was well-received--even though it invited many people to make a paradigm shift in how they thought about this issue (not a comfortable or easy thing to do).
Several distinctions need to be made for the conversation to not bog down quickly. For example, are we talking to an individual for whom we can customize our language based on a deep knowledge of that individual or are we producing materials (an ad campaign, brochures, handouts, a video) for a broad audience or are we talking with an individual whom we really do not know and are not able to get to know given the constraints of the setting, etc.?
If we have the chance to customize our language to the thoroughly known needs, context, etc. of the person with whom we're speaking, we should do so. This situation is, unfortunately, rather rare. Most of the time, we just don't get the chance to get to know someone well before we interact with them about breastfeeding--or we're developing materials for a large audience. That's when we have to use a "default" choice of infant feeding rhetoric. That default is often not consciously chosen--it's often just the way we've always spoken about infant feeding. My presentation starts with a discussion of what we might base that default choice upon: habit, what our colleagues usually choose, personal opinion, cultural bias, ethics, science, the principles of informed decision making, what's been shown to be effective at a population level, .... Given that there's been no review of the evidence published yet--and my review took two years to accomplish--it's very hard to make an intentional, well-informed choice based on a systematic examination of a variety of complex factors that influence rhetoric choice and it's impact. I obviously can't write out my review of the literature in this post, but I just wanted to say that I believe that the big-picture evidence supports a default rhetoric choice of risk-based language.
I wish I had something in print so I could better contribute to this conversation.
I'm still nomail so please carbon copy me if you wish me to see a reply,
Cynthia
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Cynthia Good Mojab, MS clinical psychology, IBCLC, RLC, CATSM
Ammawell
Website: http://home.comcast.net/~ammawell
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