I wrote;
 >>A baby who stools once every 10days-2 weeks at 10weeks of age is NOT 
unheard of my any means. Haven't we been round and round on this on Lactnet MANY 
times and the general consensus is always the same. Of course the foul smell 
warrants a closer look but I do hear from many of these infrequent poopers that 
they are more gassy and sometimes smelly for the few days prior to the 
*product*.  Could this be all in Mom's perception?<<

Jennifer responds;
>>No, this is not perception--it is reality. And while there is a general 
consensus to ignore this problem, I disagree completely and think it is important 
that mothers have all of the information. Assuming there is no medical 
condition such as Hirschsprung's Disease present, there is every reason to explore 
other possibilities for the symptoms, rather than dismissing them as normal.

As Dee Kassing noted in her post, therapies such as chiropractic,CST (and 
other bodywork), homeopathy and even just allergy elimination can normalize 
stooling patterns when managing breastfeeding doesn't. In my experience, this is 
true in the vast majority of cases.<<

What I meant by my question   is could THIS Mom's perception of *extremely* 
foul smelling be another Mom's *just a little stinky* and the obvious answer 
is- of course it could. 
Does this preclude further investigation? -of course not.   I certainly was 
not "dismissing the symptoms as normal" (Jenifer's words), I was introducing 
the possibility that they could be.
As has been mentioned many times on lactnet, there are many exclusively best 
fed babies with infrequent stooling patterns-so many in fact that this is one 
of the more frequent call in questions from Moms. These babies are usually 
happy, fat and without allergy symptoms. How do we call this abnormal?   Aren't 
we always touting that the parameters of *normal* should be determined by the 
breastfeeder not the bottle feeder?   Although I am VERY willing to change my 
thoughts given evidence to the contrary, it is hard to make abnormal out of 
what *appears to be* a normal variant.
Lynn Shea Rn,Bsn,Ibclc
Franklin,Massachusetts

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