Does anyone else see that pumps given in the first few weeks or months, can often have negative effects? said Michelle Scott YES, ALL THE TIME. After all, if you don't know how to ease the distressing situation a woman is in, you want to give her something. If you can't give her immediate "solutions" (ARE there always immediate solutions? NO.) to her difficulties, the temptation is to give something. A pump. A nipple shield. A supplement. A technique to practice. Of course, sometimes these are appropriate and helpful things to give. But, if you don't have the judgement and the TIME to understand what is going on and you have seen or heard that pumps, etc. can be useful (as a result of all the pump advertising which appears in "breastfeeding friendly places", perhaps) then the temptation is to *give* the mother something, even if you haven't really thought through if it is going to help. Hey, I've done it with the car. When I hear a strange noise I have been known to go to the car wash, add more oil, ask my husband to make sure everything under the bonnet looks ok. Then I hope, in a sort of haze of ignorance, that I might have headed off some problem and avoided a trip to the garage. And sometimes it appears to work!!!!! Sure, I KNOW that it is probably because the noise was imagined or whatever, but its hard not to feel that I accomplished something with a little attention. Isn't this what a lot of magical practices, described by anthroplogists, are designed to do? For us, technology is a new magic. Magda Sachs Breastfeeding Supporter The Breastfeeding Network