06/23/2016
A very sad personal experience that has influenced her perception of reality. There are babies who can't get enough milk from breastfeeding alone, cutie baby was one of them, but in general exclusive breastfeeding is safe and healthy for the babies of moms who choose to do it.
Here is some of her story in quotes with my comments after
" We were discharged at 48 hours at 5% weight loss with next-day follow-up."
--This is a normal amount of weight loss
"We saw our pediatrician at around 68 hours of life (end of day 3). Despite producing the expected number of wet and dirty diapers, he had lost 1 pound 5 ounces, about 15% of his birth weight."
--This is not within the normal limits and standard of care is that their Dr should make a solid plan to help this mom and baby.
"At the time, we were not aware of and were not told the percentage lost, and having been up all night long trying to feed a hungry baby, we were too exhausted to figure out that this was an incredible amount of weight loss. He was jaundiced but no bilirubin was checked."
--Not sure how she knows he had jaundice or if it looked serious why the Dr wouldn't have verified it by checking bilirubin levels.
"Our pediatrician told us that we had the option of either feeding formula or waiting for my milk to come in at day 4 or 5 of life."
--What??? I wasn't there and I don't know the circumstance or why the Dr made this decision, but this is not the standard of care. They should have been told the seriousness of the situation and given information on supplementing and told the potential issues that could occur if the baby didn't eat. Cutie baby lost way less than this before people starting being like your child needs food NOW and started weighing her extra and pretty much REQUIRING I supplement with something - we got donor breast milk starting on day 2 of life.
"Wanting badly to succeed in breastfeeding him, we went another day unsuccessfully breastfeeding and went to a lactation consultant the next day who weighed his feeding and discovered that he was getting absolutely no milk. When I pumped and manually expressed, I realized I produced nothing." --The pre and post weight is an ok measure but it has been proven that pumping is not an accurate way to measure production.
It is very sad her baby was injured and I agree that more should've been done to warn her, but looking at all the numbers she presents there aren't large quantities of babies with issues. Certainly not enough babies to warrant all the protocols she wants to put in place. Let's look at the numbers in this quote " In fact, a study has shown that exclusive breastfeeding at discharge is associated with an 11-fold higher risk of rehospitalization for underfeeding and dehydration." The number of babies that were rehospitalized is 2.1 in 1000 that's breastfed and bottle fed combined so that 11 fold higher risk is within that 0.21% which isn't high at all. Also she says "In a study of 280 mother-baby dyads, 22% of motivated mothers intending to exclusively breastfeed who received close lactation support experienced delayed onset of copious milk production, or lactogenesis II, which put her child at 7-fold increased risk of excessive weight loss greater than 10%." 280 is not a big enough number to generalize this information to the whole population of California (where the study took place) let alone the United States. Also even though 22% of moms had delayed onset of milk production only 12% of the babies had excess weight loss which contradicts her statement of "This means more than 1 in 5 newborns are at risk of starvation-related complications if exclusively breastfed from birth." While they were technically at risk the study showed that half of those 1 in 5 babies were fine.
I agree that women need to be educated on the risks and what potential issues to look for when exclusive breastfeeding, but some of her recommendations seem a bit excessive/unnecessary.
I have more comments on this and want to look more into other studies she mentions. I will make an expanded post on my site in the next few days. But right now cutie baby thinks she needs to nurse!
http://insufficientbreastfeedingdangers.blogspot.com/2015/02/letter-to-doctors-and-parents-about_28.html
This is a blog created to inform the public of the dangers of insufficient feeding of exclusively breastfed newborns in the first days of life. Breastfeeding should be achieved with the baby's safety as the top priority. The current guidelines do not sufficiently protect newborns from being underfed...
