The Skeptical OB

There has been a furor over the latest American Academy of Pediatrics recommendation to breastfeed children for two years. The paper that offers the new recommendation is Policy Statement: Breastfeeding and the Use of Human Milk written by Joan Younger Meek, MD and Lawrence Noble, MD. Extended breastfeeding dramatically increases the physical, psychological and economic […]

Despite ubiquitous recommendations to breastfeed and notwithstanding sincere intention to breastfeed, women often quit for two common reasons: not enough breastmilk and too much pain while breastfeeding. For decades we’ve done nothing about either problem for the simple reason that lactation professionals have engaged in a massive campaign of denial. The most cherished article of […]

Breastfeeding research is a complete and utter joke. Why? Because breastfeeding researchers ignore their OWN findings. Case in point: An exploration of pregnant women and mothers’ attitudes, perceptions and experiences of formula feeding and formula marketing, and the factors that influence decision-making about infant feeding in South Africa. Breastfeeding researchers set out to show that […]

If you want to understand contemporary lactivism — and its tenets that exist independent of or even in direct opposition to — scientific evidence, you need to understand the social movements behind them. The phrase ”breast is best” is a social construct masquerading as a medical claim. Contemporary lactivism owes its origins to two social […]

Why do so many good mothers feel bad about breastfeeding? Why has breastfeeding become the leading risk factor for newborn hospital readmission resulting in tens of thousands of readmissions each year? Why have none of the benefits predicted for term babies (decreased mortality, severe morbidity and healthcare expenditures) come to pass? It’s because “breast is […]

In a victory for both babies and mothers, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has REMOVED exclusive breastfeeding rate as a hospital quality metric! Specifically, the government removed PC-05. What is PC-05? PC-05 assesses the rate of newborns exclusively fed breast milk during the newborn’s entire hospitalization. As I’ve written in the past, […]

Recently Chrissy Teigen issued a full throated defense of infant formula. ok I’m gonna say something and you all are definitely gonna make it a thing but here goes: normalize formula. [N]ormalize breastfeeding is such a huge, wonderful thing. but I absolutely felt way more shame having to use formula because of lack of milk […]

Ironically, one of the most racist examples of breastfeeding advocacy that I’ve ever seen can be found on the website of a bastion of liberalism, National Public Radio. Entitled Secrets Of Breast-Feeding From Global Moms In The Know, it exploits black African bodies to promote the values of privileged, Western, white women. It’s almost like […]

Sadly, there is an ugly history of racism in medicine. What’s less well known is the history of racism in natural childbirth advocacy and breastfeeding promotion. As Alison Phipps explains in‘The New Reproductive Regimes of Truth,’ a chapter in the book The Politics of the Body: Gender in a Neoliberal and Neoconservative Age, natural childbirth […]

Imagine a study that compared in hospital blood transfusion rates to death rates. What would you conclude if that study found that people who received blood transfusions were more likely to die than those who did not? Would you postulate that blood transfusions caused deaths? Would you recommend that blood transfusions be withheld? Of course […]