Two days ago I went to a conference run by the Victorian branch of the
Nursing Mothers' Association of Australia.  It was a real feast.  Anne-Marie
Widstrom was the first speaker and it was fascinating to hear and see her
work on inborn behaviours of newborns.

An extra special treat was to see the ongoing work of  Dr John Neil on
imaging of baby' feeding.  The first part of his work was to describe what
is normal inside the baby's mouth.  He has developed various measurements
for standard feeding.  The second phase of the project was to see if he
could find a correlation between clinically diagnosed problems (eg sore
nipples, suck confusion {his preferred term for nipple confusion}) and
particular measurements.  He has made a video of his work and I believe it
should be commercially available later in the year.  The work on suck
confusion gives the most definite results in the study.

John Neil is an obstetrician (who attended the birth of two of my children
and so I have a soft spot for him anyway!), who is also an IBCLC and who
works closely with the IBCLCs in his hospital (the Royal Women's Hospital in
Melbourne).  I do not know where and when this work is to be published, but
I suggest you look out for it.  One other interesting point was that he
referred to the work of Brian Palmer as presented at the ILCA conference.
There are obvious links in the two areas of work.

Isn't Lactnet great in enabling us to know about ongoing research in
lactation well before it is published!

Philippa Thomson
Melbourne, Australia