Maureen, when the research in question is designed to examine a phenomenon
seen daily in many sertings in the US and likely a lot of other places, is
carried out according to the governing rules and ethical scrutiny in place,
using participants who freely volunteer after considering the information
abput what participation entails, in a reasonably fumctioning democracy
with a fairly free press, it's impossible for me not to protest at your
calling it a crime of violence. The mothers are not prisoners or slaves.
They would likely experience the same care with or without the research
context. Until we have heard from the authors what the advice on soothing
was, we can assume nothing about its effect on feeding frequency because we
don't know.
It may be that all your worst suspicions will be confirmed, in which case
we need to hear about it, but until then it is uncalled for to accuse them
of assault.
Sarah, I don't believe it is customary for authors of journal articles to
be paid on publication. Their income is only indirectly tied to
publication, because if they never get anything published, their funding
dries up. But whatever the journal charges for access to full text of
articles, none of it goes into the authors' pockets.
I maintain that the most interesting thing about the article in question is
its wide dissemination despite its small size. The fact that statistical
significance was achieved for the difference in prevalence of exclusive or
any bf betwwen the groups is not evidence that the intervention was the
determining factor. It merely means that there are strong odds the
differences were not due to chance. Not the same thing. I think the
confounders such as parity and mean gestational age of the babies are two
prime confounders, i.e. factors influencing the outcome but not controlled
for through the randomization process. The differences in bf rates were
dramatic but the differences in gestational age and in proportions of
primiparas were not. Things can be highly clinically relevant even when
they are not statistically significant, and the smaller the 'n', the more
likely it is that a confounder will confound the results.
Valerie Flaherman is easily approachable and she is no enemy of
breastfeeding, far from it. The more feedback she gets with constructive
criticism of this study, the better her future research will be.
I'm a staunch advocate of judging research articles after reading the full
text, and of resisting the temptation to condemn them based on reading the
abstract, or, heaven forbid, a mass media version of a press release based
on someone else's grasp of the abstract.
Rachel Myr, Kristiansand

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