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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