Fellow Lactnetter's

Thanks for your responses when I was looking for wives tales proven true to
present our doctors (as part of my introduction to them in my new job).  I
wanted to let you know how it went.

Since it was a brief presentation I chose just a few choice topics and wrote
the wives tale down and under it I put the citation from the journal article
supporting it.

I discussed how sometimes old wives tales are like the telephone game we used
to play as kids.  You know, the more the story gets passed around the more
the details become distorted until you may not even be able to recognize it
eventually.

Anyway -  The topics I covered were - breastfed babies are healthier - to put
this in context I told the story my uncle used to tell me about living
throught he flu epidemic in 1919.  He would come home from school and his
mother insisted that all the children breastfeed for a few minutes to keep
them healthy.  (This really got the docs attention). :).  Then I pointed out
the some articles on reduced incidence of ear infections and one on reduced
risk of childhood cancers.

Next I brought up Breastfeeding mothers shouldn't eat this and that.....  I
discussed the article about bovine IgG in human milk and was able to have a
good discussion about how there is no blanket rule for food avoidance.  We
talked about individualizing and how to help a mother identify an offending
food without compromising her nutritional status.  They were very interested.

It was great that JHL had that "Time Was ..." piece last month.  I used it
since it mentioned cool cabbage leaves from a piece from 1890.  Then I
pointed out the article from BIRTH, along with the reality of the results and
how the study was done vs how we use them.  They got a chuckle out of this
one.

Finally I brought up "You can't get pregnant when breastfeeding" wives tale.
 I of course brought up the LANCET article on LAM.  One doctor told me that
the failure rate for the birth control pill is 1 in 1000 (?).  I can't
imagine where he got that stat since in my family planning training (two
years ago) it wasn't that effective.   Anyway, I expected to lose them on
this one.  I had copies of the articles for them to take if they were
interested.  Very few were taken.

All in all, however, I thought it went quite well.  It was good to meet the
docs and put names to faces.

Thanks again for your support.

Denise Parker