Nancy,
One definition I found of medicine is - "the learned profession that
is mastered by graduate training in a medical school and that is
devoted to preventing or alleviating or curing diseases and injuries".
If one thinks of this definition, then we could surely say that
breastfeeding ought to be a concern of medicine. This is because
breastfeeding is a foundation in the preventing and alleviating and
even the curing of disease and perhaps even injury.
OTOH, we could also say that breathing clean air, eating truly
nourishing food, drinking pure water, personal hygiene, having a
healthy, positive mindset, mastery of the mind-body connection,
embracing our intuitive nature, exercise, living in harmony with the
physical and spiritual worlds we inherit, having a strong psyche are
all the concerns of medicine, as they are components of preventing,
alleviating or curing dis-ease. Trust in the innate human drive to seek
health and wellness in an individually unique way would be a concern of
medicine.
These are certainly integral to the practice of eastern and holistic
forms of medicine, but those medicines are more comfortable with the
aspects of our humanity that are difficult to quantify.
We need attunement and deep respect for the preparation of the fertile
body that consciously conceives a human child, an intention to grow
that child in a vibrant and whole way--honoring the unique family that
is becoming, honoring the fully conscious nature of the fetus in utero
and in the process of birth that only he is designed to direct. We need
to honor the intuitive knowing of the mother, allowing the dyad to
transition to life outside of the womb in a peaceful, powerful way that
respects the psycho-spiritual nature of the family. And, in fact, there
is a great body of research in the field of pre and perinatal
psychology that has been ignored by allopathy in its desire to control
rather than trust and honor human processes.
If all of this were a concern of allopathic medicine, we could not
ethically invade women and their babies during pregnancy with dangerous
and/or useless testing and procedures, we could not ignore the
experience of the infant---teaching the mother in the process to ignore
her own intuitive blossoming, being ignorant of the utter importance of
maternal diet--both her physical and emotional nourishment. We could
not so casually undermine the mother's ability to birth her own baby
without drugging both of them, without brutalizing both of them,
without disrespecting both of them--tearing them from one another,
disrupting their trust and their genuine ecology, expecting them in
some way to be glued back together by even more interventions.
As I see allopathy practiced in the west, little if any concern is
shown for the mind-body connection, for the maintenence of
wellness/well-being, for the prevention of dis-ease. It is a science of
"disease"-care and approaches the "healing" of illness from an
adversarial perspective--crush it, kill it, obliterate it. So, any
aspect of human health that becomes a concern of allopathy tends to be
framed in that world-view--a world-view grounded in fear rather than
trust.
So, I want to protect all normal, non-dis-ease aspects of human
experience from the concern of medicine, b/c whenever medicine becomes
concerned with us, it has a tendency to make us less than what we are
capable of being, to make us inferior to itself, to disregard our
hearts and our souls and frame us within its own narrow model. Because
breastfeeding is so integral to the nature of mothering, thus integral
to the nature of humanity, I want very much to protect it from a brutal
beginning so as to protect the possibility that mothers may come to
know their own true nature and the nature of their babies w/o its
interference.
I do not think people--human beings with their own hearts and souls
and mind-body relationships go into medicine to create these outcomes,
but there is something in the nature of the medical model that
perpetuates itself in spite of the humanity of its practitioners. I
once read a book called "A Woman in Residence", written by Michelle
Harrison, MD describing her experiences as a OB resident, observing the
inhumane treatment of women in obstetrics. The reality is that there is
plenty of evidence out there to justify the demedicalization of
pregnancy, birth and breastfeeding, even to demand it. If western
medicine were indeed concerned with healing, it would willingly give up
its control of these normal life processes and women would not have to
awaken and do battle----women and medicine could be allies in
sustaining human health and well-being and living vitaly rather than
simply living longer in a dis-eased body, could be our unified intent.
Jennifer Tow, IBCLC, CT, USA
Intuitive Parenting Network LLC
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