Nancy, you wrote:
"Peter Hartmann and his associates and students and the UWA are doing incredible research which benefits us all in our efforts to help mothers with evidence-based information and care.  Yes, it is largely funded by  Medela.  
However, Dr. Hartmann has incredibly high standards and  demands intellectual honesty of all his associates and students."

I agree that some of the stuff coming out of Hartmann's group has been incredibly useful.  I see that you praise his high standards and his demands for intellectual honesty, and I don't pretend to know him personally.  But the one time I heard him speak, I was really put off in a serious way by his spending at least 10 percent of the time allotted him to sing the praises of the Medela pump company for their funding of his work.  He was in Europe to lecture at a conference put on by the German language branch of ILCA.  I paid to attend the conference, and looked forward to hearing him at a professional event not put on by Medela, and I don't understand how he could cheat us out of ten percent of the lecture time by devoting it to a purely commercial message.

Medela also sent a guy to Norway about 9 years back to present Hartmann's work at the national meeting of the BF mothers' organization Ammehjelpen.  He was Swedish and I have repressed my recollection of his name but he repeatedly referred to his 'pappa' who was part of the original Medela company.  His presentation of the Hartmann group's work was also off-puttingly commercially angled and his professional credentials were kind of vague.  We were given to understand that he was sent because he was Swedish and it would be cheaper for Medela to send him to Norway from Sweden than to bring Hartmann in from Australia.  I did not succeed in learning what his academic credentials were but he acted a lot like salesmen I have met and because of that, everything he said just rubbed me the wrong way.  I was not there to be sold on a pump brand, I was there to attend the meeting of the BF organization.

After the way Hartmann conducted himself on that occasion I have a hard time taking him seriously because he seemed dangerously indebted to a particular manufacturer and I wasn't convinced that he could really be objective enough.  But perhaps he is just like the frog who jumps into a pot of water that is comfortably relaxing and warm, only to have the temperature climb gradually, scarcely noticeably, until suddenly he is being boiled alive and it's too late to jump out.  That, to me, is the best analogy for what happens to the rest of us when we ally ourselves with anyone whose motives may be in conflict with ours.

Rachel Myr
Kristiansand Norway

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