Diane W. -

I like your "dumbo feather" analogy; I guess when I think about the
questions you pose, I come back to the same thing I always come up with:
people are different, and they need different approaches and styles, and
sometimes what works for someone is exactly opposite what works for others.
No Duh - I guess we note that often enough on lactnet! So that's where the
art and the skill of lactation counseling come in; we don't just have to
know really a lot about breasts and babies and all that stuff, we need to be
just about super-humanly sensitive to the people we talk to. I guess for me
this is, as my sister says, "the hill I'll die on" - the Cause, the Quest,
the Mission, whatever you'd call it; it's not just about breastfeeding
facts, it's about the ways that different people need different things.

So YOU don't need to "know what to think" about breast shells (or any other
gizmo, gadget, etc.), exactly - you need *exactly* what you are already
doing: to know enough about them and the pros and cons and the appropriate &
not-appropriate possible uses etc. that you can share that info with folks &
let them decide. Does that make one wishy-washy? I don't think so - I prefer
to think of it as flexibility.

Cathy Bargar, RN, IBCLC, Ithaca NY