In my never-ending effort to "curb my tongue from speaking evil" while still
getting out the word, I have fallen back on the tactic of asking lots of
questions.   These effectively trace what the mother knows, or even thinks
she knows, and eventually come to the point where it becomes clear to her (if
I'm doing it right) that there is something she wishes she knew.

For example, a close friend of mine is a developmental pediatrician (!!!!)
who nursed her kids for about 6 months with great pleasure.  When I saw her
with her younger child, then about 9 months, feeding formula in a bottle, I
expressed amazement and was told with resignation, "I know, it's too bad, but
my milk dried up at about six months -- it was the same with my son."   So I
asked her, "How did you know it dried up?"

She had a bunch of answers -- less fullness, hungry baby, etc.   Instead of
arguing with her answers, which after all might or might not be correct, some
moms really do experience a drop in supply, I asked another question.  "When
that happened, what did you do about it?"  This had just never occured to her
-- in the world she lived in, if your "milk dried up," then you fed formula,
end of story.

"And what did your pediatrician recommend for your milk supply?" I asked.
Still drawing a blank.   By now she was wondering whether there was anything
she should have done; but after all her pedi *hadn't* told her anything, so
why be perturbed.

At this point, when it had become clear that there was something she *now
wished she had known then,* I could go a little more in the direction of a
rhetorical or argumentative questions.  "And if some other of your
physiologic fluids dried up -- say, your kidneys stopped making urine --
would you just go resignedly to dialysis, or would you seek some professional
advice?"

By this time I could stop asking her questions -- now she was asking me
questions, about who she could have seen (an IBCLC, naturally) and what kind
of things they might have tried (anything from nurse-a-thons to fenugreek to
lots of stuff I in my untrained state probably don't even think of!).
Suffice it to say that if *her* patients' mothers now say their milk is
drying up, her first advice to them *may* not be to cut straight to formula.

This approach doesn't always work -- no approach always works, right? -- and
I find myself undermining it sometimes by making the questions too
argumentative or rhetorical too early, before the non-argumentative questions
have brought the mother to see that something is missing from her story.
But if I am able to ask *true* questions, really trying to find out how the
mother's own process of arriving at her conclusion went ("Why did he say that
taking penicillin necessitated weaning?")  I find many of these mothers may
begin to think twice about what they previously swallowed without thinking
once.

Elisheva Urbas
struggling every day for tact and just the right, small amount of
judgmentalism in NYC

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