Oh Barbara, put like this, is it any wonder the Health Professions Council
has had my application for registration for five years and is still
undecided about what to do with it?  We obviously have a *looooong* way to
go!  How depressing!

"The simple truth is, we don't yet have an identified core curriculum. We
lack an  educational pathway which other health care professionals can look
at to understand what our knowledge base is.  We have practicioners who have
wildly different educations and experience bases all calling themselves the
same thing.  We even lack common terminology  between ourselves on
identifying basic problems.  We have non-MDs who describe what they do as
"diagnosing" and we have people who are practicing way beyond the identified
scope of practice identified by ILCA. I bet there are IBCLCs reading this
post who have never read the IBLCE Code of Ethics.  We have people who call
themselves LCs (or whose institutions refer to them as such) who are not
subject to any peer review process, and who perform clinical duties without
outcome monitoring or even routine reporting.  These are serious,
unaddressed consumer  protection issues.  We have complicated, undecided
ethical issues regarding marketing of retail goods.  I'd say we have so much
work to do  on the beam in our own eyes, that we'd best stop wasting time
worrying about stuff we can't control.  Until we deal with some of these
in-house issues, who can blame the rest of the medical community for not
being able to figure us out, and suspecting that we might just be zealots?"

Pamela Morrison IBCLC (and proud of it!), Zimbabwe