NOW they tell me
Crawling out from under my rock to share this:
Breast Pump Not Best Way to Succeed at Breast Feeding
Talk amongst yourselves. I'll be back soon.
Breast Pump Not Best Way to Succeed at Breast Feeding
Talk amongst yourselves. I'll be back soon.
Labels: in the news, lactation
posted by electriclady at 7:17 PM
5 Comments:
THUNK. THUNK.
(sound of me pounding head against wall.)
CRASH.
(sound of me throwing $300 breast pump off cliff.)
Well, I feel better now.
Ha, okay. :) Well. That explains why all the Swedish pregnancy books just have pics of people hand-expressing.
I just hope I don't have another "poorly-feeding neonate."
So I really, really skimmed the abstract, but they're talking about poorly-feeding full-term neonates, right? What jumps out at me from that is that teaching hand-expressing would probably involve a certain amount of "getting comfortable with your breasts in different ways" education, and the women who got that education (it looks like they were just shown ONCE how to do it, right?) would probably have a different, more connected feeling to their bodies than the women hooked up to a machine. And that would probably translate over to higher success rates with breastfeeding? Plus, the process itself might be more transferrable to breastfeeding (hand expression might give you some new ideas about latch, for example) than pumping is.
Did you notice that output was halved with hand expression? (In that ONE intervention per mother.)
I think this study could be really useful for people feeding full-term infants without underlying production/output issues and I'm all in support of that, but I'm not at all convinced that it would help the women I've run into on the internet who are feeding pre-term babies or dealing with post-traumatic-birth production issues or all the other problems that seem to crop up. I mean, how is this THAT different from "have a fantastic coach who knows ALL the tricks when you have a rough start"? It's good information for me to store away for my daughters someday, I'll definitely keep it in mind, but ....
I don't know.
Pffft.
Know what? I'd rather hook my tits up to the vacuum in the hands-free bra and surf the web than sit there and freaking HAND MILK myself several times a day. Call me selfish.
Then again, I'm done with that now -- thank god. I have a feeling that if I was still in the middle of it, this article would have sent me into gales of anxiety.
first, I'm with molly. Expressing by hand for 15 minutes and getting 0.5mls? You're kidding, right? At least with a hands free bra i could do both boobs at once and do something else while I was doing it. Also, it's a very poorly designed study with no control group and a very small number of participants. Count me a bit sceptical.
(although also agree w jody, cld have been sthg in there about learning to love your boobs).
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