Yael wrote:
'' I  have noticed that as more nurses and health professional become "educated"
about breastfeeding, many
'' are picking up bits and pieces of information and distorting it in a
dangerous way.
snip
'' So what is the solution to this?  More education, more involvement of IBCLC's
in the health care system (a
'' rather far fetched dream here in Israel), and, also, judicious use of scales
and weighing (not necessarily pre-
'' post feed), especially when breastfeeding is so deeply misunderstood.''

That's an interesting point you raise, Yael. I've noticed such mechanisms as
well. To me it seemed not like forgetting the larger part of what they heared
(tho that will certainly be a part of it), but replacing one set of rules by
another one.
Large part of my work as LC is teaching hcp's. I quite often get the question
''But then what do we have to do now?'' They want to know how often, how much,
how long, when and what. That is how they were teached to work in the first
place: there are rules for everything you do as a nurse or postnatal caretaker.
So when we teach them that their first set of rules is outdated, they're happy
to change, but need to have another set of rules. And most of the time we have
to tell them that no mother-baby-pair is like any other pair and that there are
no rules for every situation. So, I think that only a shift in initial training
methods in nursing school will change this kind of thinking. People in
healthcare professions need to learn to think for themselves, train their own
curiosity and creativity, train their intuition as well as scientific thinking
skills. Ofcourse there need to be a stable and sound basis of scientific
knowledge, but that needs not be translated into a fixed set of rules.

Gonneke van Veldhuizen, IBCLC, Maaseik, Belgium
http://www.users.skynet.be/eurolac
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