"The science of lactation is just fascinating.  I keep having to alter my
mind set to stay up with the new things the research is teaching us, and I
really want to second Linda Smith's excellent post reminding us to 'do our
homework.'  "

Barbara, I agree with you on having to stay up with the new things research
is teaching us.  However, the research I am trying to stay up with is a bit
different from the research you are looking at.  You are interested in
'components of milk' research -- and I agree that this is fascinating, and
challenging some previous beliefs.  The research I am principally trying to
keep up with is the qualitative research on how women experience
breastfeeding, what it means in their lives.

What I think we desperately need is more people who familiarise themselves
with both (and I do try to do that, and maybe you do too.  I know my bias is
to the latter, though!).  So often I read an article in a feminist or
sociological journal and think 'there are some really interesting insights
here, that might be of importance, but the whole arguement is completely let
down by the fact that the author CLEARLY does not have a thorough knowledge
of everyday breastfeeding.  And sometimes authors sort of dismiss the need
for this knowledge with statements like 'breastfeeding advocates would say
that the distress some of the women in this study experienced with
breastfeeding is due to problems with attachment of  the baby to the
breast'.  Well, I think that is no doubt true, some of the distress I read
in the quotes seems to me to stem from iatrogenic mismanagement of
breastfeeding.  However, that does not make me insist that the women in the
study would have all been happy with their breastfeeding experience if they
had had decent help with the physical aspects of breastfeeding.   And the
reseach about what women feel is biased when the women in the studies are
all experiencing some damaged form of breastfeeding (it may tell us what
wmoen feel about what is happening now, and be valuable for that, but it
tells us little about what women might feel about *breastfeeding*).

In fact, some of the 'milk component' type research also suffers hideously
from the lack of understanding of breastfeeding.  This was the point Valerie
Maclain was making, I think, when she wrote her letter to JHL about the
Semba research on mastitis and hiv transmission, where the milk was treated
in a way which would cause us to doubt it bore much relation to milk the
baby would get, and where the authors of the paper did not understand that
'weaning' has a wider field of meaning than they understood.

So, let us all remember to 'straddle the line' of different types of
research (however you divide them up -- there are a number of different
'fields') and try to learn from each other what insights are avialable from
the fields where we, personally, are less likely to browse.  Indeed, that is
one of the most valuable aspects of lactnet for me.  I have felt more
enabled to brave papers with statistics and milk components, in order to
help build my (still imperfect!) holistic knowledge of breastfeeding.

Magda Sachs
Breastfeeding Supporter, BfN, UK

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