Dear all: Anytime I have heard anything about national trends regarding breastfeeding practices in other countries, I have always tried to ensure that I included a question for those working in those countries to correct me if what I heard might be wrong. If I have failed to do so in spite of my efforts to be diligent, my apologies. My apologies because I think it is unfair to make comments about a few posters opinions and extrapolate on the basis of nationality. In any one country, in any one state, province or other national subdision within a country, in any one city, in any one group within a city, there are always differences of opinions. The United States represents immense diversity of opinions, state to state, region to region, city to city. Since I have worked internationally, I would love to see far more IBCLCs who are from other countries. Yet, I do not believe that I can take any posting from a few IBCLCs from any one country and say that their opinions are representative of that country. The last time we had a discussion on scales, I wrote a post that commented that there may very well be differences in a public health sense making scales unecessary in certain settings except for rare exceptional cases and more widely used in other settings and we should understand "appropriate" use of tools on a public health level based on the circumstances we encounter. Never once did I state that everyone everywhere should always use them. I once said to try them out and play with them to see for yourself even if you decided never to use them because you found them inappropriate for your context. There are many tools others have used that I finally played around with and rarely use but now I understand them better. I also asked both my colleagues from the Netherlands and Australia if what I had heard from clients about routine 24 hour test weighing in both countries had really been the case and expressed the opinion that such use would NOT be warranted and certainly would create an understandable antipathy towards scales if what I had heard was true. I did not make any statements assuming that the few people that told me this were correct. The most vociferous defender of the IBCLE posted SOP was not from the United States and I would NEVER in my wildest dreams have ever extrapolated this to be an opinion representing the entire country that this person was from. That would be ludicrous. I have seen a wide range of opinions on the topic of scale use and that vast majority of posters that find a value in them have not made blanket statements that everyone shoulld use them. Most have merely pointed out situations in which they have found them useful. I've tried to post about appropriate and inappropriate use on a public health scale. One mainstay articulate poster has made many points about overmedicalization of IBCLCs and she happens to be from the USA. (And a personal comment that I think she is very professional in her practice even if she never lays a finger on a scale ever in her entire career). A MINORITY of posters on scale use have suggested that everyone should use them always. On the other hand there have been a lot of posts too about the harmful use of scales. I myself have pointed out examples of public health programs where they have been harmful. Yet, I have not tallied up the nationalities of those who do not use scales and claim that those who call them harmful are from a particular nationality. Nor would I ever think in my wildest dreams that all those that do not use scales think those of us who do use scales are "harming our clients". There are a few posts that I could take excerpts from and misconstrue and extrapolate into that unfounded position --- but it would be ludicrous. As with the comment that about the "silent 3000", please don't extrapolate or project to a particular group based on one or a few posts. One of the things that I personally would like to see is a conserted effort to ensure that the IBCLC profession truly becomes international so such comments about nationality are no longer even considered. There is much expertise in many parts of the world in breastfeeding support that is not captured and we suffer because those voices are not heard that would give us a much broader interpretation. I was shocked to discover that the statistics from the 2004 exam showed that over 90% of the exam takers were from the United States, Australia, Canada, and Germany. Best regards, Susan Burger *********************************************** To temporarily stop your subscription: set lactnet nomail To start it again: set lactnet mail (or digest) To unsubscribe: unsubscribe lactnet All commands go to [log in to unmask] The LACTNET email list is powered by LISTSERV (R). There is only one LISTSERV. To learn more, visit: http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html