The problem with looking for a physician with personal breastfeeding
experience is that it may have been a negative breastfeeding experience,
or in any event, one's personal experience is unlikely to be an adequate
basis for counseling and providing care to other mothers, each with
their own unique issues and problems. There is the risk that the
physician untrained in human lactation and breastfeeding may equate
personal breastfeeding experience with optimal breastfeeding practice.
In no other area of medicine that I can think of do we base our choice of
physician
on whether she or he has personal experience of that phenomenon.We don't
pick surgeons according to their personal experience of surgery, or
cardiologists according to whether they have had heart disease. Physicians
should be knowledgeable about breastfeeding, irrespective of their
child-bearing or child-rearing choices. Ross data indicates
that mothers who are physicians have rates of breastfeeding initiation
and duration similar to other mothers in their particular ethnic group and
region who are well educate--not higher or longer.

I think in saying that personal experience is necessary to be competent
in providing breastfeeding care, we are implying that breastfeeding
knowledge and skills are not part of the skill set all competent physicians
are expected to have--that it's something extra that's nice to have, if you
happen to have parented a child who breastfed.

By the way, Linda Black, Miriam Labbok, and Audrey Naylor are three
physicians who come immediately to mind who have been leaders in promoting
breastfeeding, including clinically, but who do not have personal experience
of breastfeeding.
The majority of physicians in the U.S. are men, and most physicians who
are parents and whose children were breastfed did not experience optimal
breastfeeding practice. Yet all should be encouraged to become competent
 providers of breastfeeding care--because it's part of practicing good
medicine.
Elizabeth Williams, MD, MPH
Stanford Univ. School of Medicine
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