Hi Kathleen,

Don't worry, nurses have said that about doctors for years.  Sometimes
they are right, sometimes they are wrong, but they usually don't get
into trouble.  Everyone has a right to their opinion, and if they feel
they can denigrate your work and ideas, they should be able to take a
little criticism.  Besides, if you don't say it in front of the
patients, there is nothing wrong with it.  I say it in front of the
patients, but I am a little safer than you are.

Your pediatrician would accept 1% of the evidence on breastfeeding if it
were about oligosaccharides added to infant formula preventing otitis
media, or lecithin supplements during pregnancy preventing club foot.
It's only because it is about breastfeeding, and because pediatricians
feel very threatened on this issue that they talk that way.  (Infant
feeding is *the* pediatric field.  If you don't know about infant
feeding, what do you know?  So people coming in and saying to
pediatricians that they don't know boo all about breastfeeding--which is
true, of course--is very threatening for the poor dears).  Rather than
admit the truth, they lash out.  Sure those studies are flawed.  What
studies are not?  But if your pediatrician were objective, he would say
to himself:  "Boy, there are so many known (not suspected, *known*)
differences between breastmilk and formula.  Breastfeeding, of course,
is the physiologic method of feeding.  Therefore the burden is on me to
prove with good (not flawed?) studies that infant formula is as good as
breastfeeding *in every way* before I spout off about formula being as
good as breastfeeding.  But then, it is obvious he is not being
intellectually honest.

You can copy that (minus the first paragraph) and you can show it to
him, if you want.  I have nothing to fear and I would tell him to his
face as I did some clown in Huntsville Alabama "How can you pretend to
be a scientist when you do not demand of yourself as a person pushing an
intervention the solid proof that the intervention is not harmful?"

Have a good week?  (Question mark there on purpose).  As we used to say
in Latin class--oops forgot the latin.  The English translation was
"Don't let the bastards get you down.".  They're not worth the
aggravation, and they will eventually understand the folly of their
ways.  I believe there is justice in the world (I don't know why, but
that's my faith).  They will understand, but don't expect an apology.

Jack