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