Just one more comment on unreliable studies.

A couple of years ago, I was working on a book with a pediatrician from
Toronto's Sick Kids Hospital. He wanted to state that there was no problem
with giving breastfed babies a bottle or two a day right from birth and
claimed he had research to prove this. Well, the study he had was the
infamous one in which mothers were randomly assigned to one of two groups
(giving a bottle a day from birth or the control group). Of course, any
mother who wanted to exclusively breastfeed was excluded from the study,
because those mothers were not willing to take the chance of being put in
the one bottle a day group. And the researchers found that by the end of the
study, the average number of bottles per day was the same in both the
control and research group. Not surprisingly; babies in both groups had
similar numbers of breastfeeding problems and early weaning.

I pointed out all these (very significant) flaws, and he rather angrily said
that to recommend exclusive breastfeeding even during the early weeks was an
intervention that this research, although flawed, did not support. He also
suggested that I was trying to add undue hardship to women's lives by
forcing them to be with their babies unnecessarily (clearly some kind of
torture!).

I naturally dropped out of that book project, although it was completed with
another writer and is selling well (big sigh).

I am frequently astonished at the very poorly done research that is out
there, and that is often used to support what I would consider terrible
medical care. I have seen studies cited in support of various interventions
(such as a recent one purporting to show that epidurals did not increase the
Cesarean rate which, when I actually looked it up, included a very small
number of people - less than 50 in each group. That's just not a large
enough sample to show anything useful in this kind of situation.) which have
terrible methods, tiny numbers, all kinds of bias, etc. But they support
current practise, so no-one complains.

On the other hand, if the research is about the benefits of breastfeeding -
it better be flawless, right?

Teresa