Thursday Throwdown
Busy day here, sorry for the late post.
This is an oldie but goody. Should formula be by prescription only? Come on, someone bite! You know you want to.
My opinion? Well, that’s slightly too “militant” for my taste, but I do think that obstetricians and pediatricians should have lactation consultants on staff who provide free home visits for new mothers who need the service. If not free, then maybe insurance should cover it. In the long run, breastfeeding is going to save us all money, so why not?
While I think that a mother who is adamant about switching to the bottle shouldn’t be harassed, I do think that pediatricians should have a questionnaire on hand for mothers who will would be willing to fill one out. The questions should focus on why the mother is choosing to not nurse anymore so that they can have the chance to be provided with help for their specific problems if they wish. Also, having the reasons that mothers give for discontinuing the nursing relationship could help breastfeeding educators and obstetricians to better prepare pregnant women for nursing.
July 6th, 2007 at 8:28 am
[...] prescriptions be required for formula? July 6th, 2007 by Kelli Allison over at The Attached Mother has some great thoughts about the whole “should prescriptions be required for formula?” [...]
July 6th, 2007 at 8:32 am
Great points! I did write about this today and linked back to you.
July 6th, 2007 at 10:11 am
I’ll be the negative one here, but I do think it should be by prescription only. Why was infant formula created? To help children who otherwise would not be able to eat. To me that makes it a life-saving treatment, and like other life-saving treatments should be by prescription. I worked as a lactation consultant with WIC (Women, Infants, and Children) and many women would give up at the first bump. It was so much easier to give up when they are receiving several packages of free formula from the companies, the hospital, the doctor’s office, and then WIC itself offers more each month for free. If formula was prescription only that would cut the free samples and “gifts” back down. Though I don’t want to see any doctor able to write a script for it. I think there needs to be infant nutritian specialists that are the only ones to write the scripts for it.
Though, I realise that there needs to be a lot of serious changes before anything like that were to happen. Better education on breastfeeding starting in school. Here despite having a sex-ed class and doing the fake baby for a week there was never a word mentioned of breastfeeding. I think if more people were educated on the mythes and realities it would help greatly. Then of course workplaces would need to be required to provide a safe and clean place for breastfeeding mothers to go, formula companies would be forced to go with the WHO code of infant formula advertising, and more doctors and nurses were required to learn more abut infant nutritian without being sponcered by the formula companies. After all of that, then put formula on a prescription-only basis.
July 6th, 2007 at 10:45 am
I’m coming at this from my libertarian perspective, which means I think that pretty much nothing should be prescription-only. I think that this specifically would be a bad idea, though, because IME the number one problem with breastfeeding is horrible advice from medical professionals. Making it Rx only means that formula companies will just act even MORE like drug companies and probably more babies will be put on formula since insurances often pay for prescriptions. I think that if someone is going to do something drastic, it should be to have required continuing education regarding breastfeeding for doctors, nurses, and LCs (all of whom have given me horrible advice, and I only got consistently good advice from LLL). And perhaps somehow have something like mystery shopping to ensure that peds aren’t continuing to recommend unnecessary supplementation and solids at 4 months.