Insufficient Training Syndrome

I've never watched the Discovery Health Channel's Deliver Me before yesterday, but I see it advertised all of the time. I swear that I don't watch TV only to catch people sharing misinformation, but there is just so much of it out there that I can't escape it.

On the episode I was watching last night, a woman came in for her postpartum check up with one of the doctors. She said something about the baby wanting to nurse all of the time (I didn't catch the exact phrasing since my kids were playing a tickle game). Rather than explain that newborns need to eat at least every two hours (no one wants that to be true, but it is), the OB told her that some moms just don't make enough milk to satisfy their babies and NEED to supplement with formula. Then she said what I consider to be her real reason for the incorrect statement, "I had to supplement both of my boys with formula because sometimes I just didn't make enough." There you go: she can't admit that she did anything wrong, so she passes off her own inaccurate logic on her patients.

I believe I've blogged before about the purely western phenomenon of "Insufficient Milk Syndrome" which mysteriously only occurs in places where formula is widely available...Read the section in Our Babies, Ourselves about it to understand that it isn't really something that happens. To be sure, there are medical conditions and plenty of medications that can cause a woman's milk to dry up a bit. If the OB on the show had begun to investigate a true cause for this woman's low supply, which she never even established that the woman had to begin with, then I would have believed that she knew what she was talking about. A newborn nursing every couple of hours (or even every hour at some point) DOES NOT mean that the mother doesn't have enough milk. The baby could be going through a growth spurt or the mom could have gotten so out of sync with her baby's feeding needs that she was only giving him the low-fat early milk and never the high-fat hind milk. Did this doctor look into any of that? Supplementing leads to lower milk production! All she did was speed up the weaning process for this mother and possibly countless other mothers watching the show. The less the baby nurses because it's getting full of synthetic milk, the less milk the mom's breasts will make. It's SUPPLY AND DEMAND!!!

I found a good quote on Kellymom about doctor's education about breastfeeding:
However, very few physicians trained in North America or Western Europe learned anything at all about breastfeeding in medical school. Even fewer learned about the practical aspects of helping mothers start breastfeeding and helping them maintain breastfeeding. After medical school, most of the information physicians get regarding infant feeding comes from formula company representatives or advertisements.

It's truly awful that in this age of cancer, obesity, diabetes, and all sorts of other problems, doctors are not being educated about breastfeeding, when not breastfeeding has been linked to all of them. Don't listen to your doctor about anything connected to breastfeeding without first researching his/her advice first. The La Leche League is not out to trap you, they have lots of info that you need.