< I'm very interested in this topic if you
want to pursue further discussion.>

I am certainly not more than barely knowledgeable about the specific
working mechanics of pumps, themselves, and just know what we counsel WIC
moms on about pumping in general.

I especially like to educate everyone I teach about pumping, what the MER
is, and how it is THE very most powerful force in getting milk to come
out of the breast!

My early experience in the hospital and personally ('50's and '60's) was
with a bicycle horn pump! I even got "reamed out" once by the supervisor
for using a pump without a doctor's order! Historically, I have been
around long enough to see the pendulum swing the other way.

Now, it seems every "Tom, Dick and Harry" in the OB department hands a
pump kit to, or slaps a pump kit on a new, postpartum mother, oftentimes,
I think, to avoid having to touch the breast!

These moms are also often the ones who have had the most IV's. It seems
to me as if so many people, HCP's and lay persons alike, get the idea
that they can turn on the big electric motor and expect milk to flow like
gasoline from a gas pump!

It seems as if so many HCP's have never thought through, or fully
understood the concept of the use of vacuum. Their experience from
medications uses the "filling a syringe from a vial" model for their
knowledge of how to use vacuum, and this, like pumping GI contents out,
etc. is based on the model of liquids exposed DIRECTLY to vacuum.

But vacuum does not "pull", even though it feels like it. In the case of
a breast pump, it greatly reduces the air pressure on a few square inches
of skin, causing the normal air pressure (at whatever altitude) to exert
force on the rest of the surface of the breast to seem to "push" the
front of the breast into the flange because "nature abhors a vacuum"!

(I wonder how breastpumping in the mountains differs from that done at
sea level? More breast pain in mountain hospitals?)

Pumps act on flesh first, including all the blood, tissue fluid,
connective tissue, etc, as well as any milk present, but so few seem to
understand the concept!

I guess you could say I have an issue with that kind of thinking!

Jean
***************
K. Jean Cotterman RNC, IBCLC
Dayton, Ohio USA

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