Let's face it.  Lactation has been largely ignored by institutions educating professionals, even here in Breastfeeding Heaven (Norway).  It is starting to change, and we all need to support each other as we wait for the critical point to be reached when a majority of people will have enough knowledge to at least realize there are things they don't know!
As long as the body of knowledge on lactation is found outside institutions for the education of HCPs, such institutions will be unsuited for the education of LCs.  The current thread on HCPs absorbing 5% of the content of continuing eds on BF and lactation "management"-- how I cringe at the term!-- points this up better than any other argument.
I think what is most frustrating to me is that mothers readily understand the principles of looking at the baby to see when, or whether, to offer a change of breasts, or of judging latch by whether it is painful or satisfying.  Mothers with little or no education grasp this as easily as mothers who have read every baby book on the market.  The ones who have the most trouble accepting in their baby's capacity to regulate intake to her/his own needs are newborn nurses used to caring for sick infants using tables showing required intake, and those nurses' aides who are very task oriented and want to get things done so they can check them off on their lists.  
And then there is the staff on the maternity wards: If a phenomenon isn't Black or White it causes major league anxiety and precipitates some of the weirdest advice known to motherhood.  A case in point is the normal duration of a meal at the breast.  The common denominator is that no BF is ever seen as normal.  The baby is either feeding too frequently or too seldom, too long or not long enough, always judged without recourse to a clinical evaluation, or even a net weighing, of the baby in question.  Pre and post weights are all too common in such situations, the only clinical tool utterly lacking in usefulness.  And heaven forbid they should Ask Mother How She Is Feeling about it!  It reveals a basic distrust of parents' abilities to weigh the evidence and make good decisions for themselves and their babies, and THAT, my friends, is the root of disempowering practice.
climbing down to check my blood pressure now
Rachel Myr
[log in to unmask]
Kristiansand, Norway

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