"It is a myth to say that the woman who breastfeeds cannot take medication." Interview with José María Paricio (II)

Yesterday we started an interesting interview with Dr. José María Paricio in which he talked about a very problematic issue for many nursing mothers: there are doctors who think that women who breastfeed can't just take medication and for this reason they stop treating them.

We were able to read the first part of this interview and today we bring you the second part, also very interesting and sobering:

Dr. Paricio, with everything that is being studied about breastfeeding and seeing that there is more and more information, do you think breastfeeding rates are increasing?

There is more than one problem with breastfeeding rates and it is, on the one hand, the little interest of health agencies in collecting them (in Healthcare everything is counted except breastfeeding rates and I mean not only Spain, but the vast majority of countries: there are no official data published or reliable) and on the other hand the lack of uniformity in the definition of breastfeeding to collect it. So when, in the absence of official data, you resort to partial works published in various scientific media, you will find exclusive breastfeeding data sometimes or of any breastfeeding, being unable to compare some areas with others.

In general, we are going along a line that we cannot say “progress properly”: the figures of more than 90% of initial breastfeeding and more than 50% at 6 months in the first decades of the twentieth century fell sharply in the 50-80 years at less than 40% at the beginning and less than 5% at 6 months; Only about 20 years ago they are improving, currently stabilizing in Spain at around 75-80% and 15-20% respectively.

Why is there so little information about medications and breastfeeding among health professionals, even among pediatricians?

Until recently, there has been no systematic consideration of women's desires, maternity, parenting and breastfeeding in the healthcare professional world. Many professionals and pharmaceutical companies are not at all informed of the physical and psychological benefits of breastfeeding so they consider the most normal thing in the world to recommend their suspension without any embarrassment. Women who breastfeed have the same right as the general population to be well treated for their illnesses with full respect for their breastfeeding, which is also that of their children.

Following this void of support in breastfeeding health, the so-called "Breastfeeding Support Groups", composed of lactation consultants and mothers, have proliferated, how do you value the work they are doing?

I consider them the possible future of breastfeeding. In the late nineteenth century, breastfeeding, like many other non-pathological human phenomena, became part of the consideration of scientific medicine to be studied and analyzed by it, ceasing to be a natural event to be a "physiological phenomenon."

We can say that she was kidnapped, abducted from women. To make matters worse, it was badly analyzed, because not only did the idea of ​​breastfeeding culture be completely forgotten, but, focusing on the physiological issue, impressive concept errors were made, eventually reinterpreting the entire technique of Breastfeeding in the light of pseudoscientific discoveries that led to the recommendation of good practices that had never existed: health workers, especially doctors throughout the twentieth century, have an important responsibility in the decline of breastfeeding.

The support groups, custodians of the feminine art of breastfeeding, are hoping that breastfeeding will be “demedicalized” and return to civil society, to the world of women, girls and boys and men, where never He must have left.

Do you mean then that breastfeeding is being seen from a medical prism in which we talk too much about nutrients and benefits, as if it were a treatment or similar?

Indeed, although there is a time and a place for everything, from the medical point of view this option has been monopolized, neglecting and ignoring the fact that breastfeeding is not only breast milk: it is a complex bio-cultural phenomenon, it is a phenomenon intimate relationship between people, is a warm system of precise care and an act of love and pleasure ...

It is difficult to explain under the simplistic conception of breastfeeding equal to milk why infant mortality (in its first year) of infants in France in the eighteenth century was 100 per thousand born when they were breastfed by their mothers, 200/1000 if they were breastfed by a nurse in the family home and 400/1000 if they lived in the village of the nurse who gave them breastfeeding. How is it possible that some had double or even four times the risk of dying, if everyone drank milk from a woman?

Many mothers will return to work after 16 weeks of maternity leave, do you think it is worth breastfeeding for only four months?

Our laws must be adapted to the sanitary recommendations of exclusive breastfeeding for at least 6 months. Our authorities are short-sighted for not understanding the benefits, not only for women and infants but for society in general, that the true reconciliation of family life with work would entail.

Meanwhile, if you ask me if it is worth breastfeeding a single day, a single hour, I can assure you that it is.