It’s truly amazing the lengths to which lactation professionals will go to avoid having to address the elephant in the room. They’ll even invite me to lunch!
What’s the elephant?
Exclusive breastfeeding has become the LEADING risk factor for newborn re-hospitalization.
As many as 1 in 71 exclusively breastfed babies will be re-hospitalized.
That means approximately 40,000 PREVENTABLE re-hospitalizations per year.
[pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Why wait until we’re in the same city, Leah? I’m happy to meet you on Facebook Live any time, including today![/pullquote]
No professional health or lactivist organization — not La Leche League, not the World Health Organization, not the American Academy of Pediatrics — denies it.
Indeed the problem has become so acute that at the forthcoming AAP Annual Meeting, they are devoting a “Controversies in Pediatrics” session to the Baby Friendly Hospital Initiative. You don’t do that if you think the program is safe and successful.
That’s the background against which I took issue with the flagrantly false claims of Yashed LC, Leah Drexler, who thought she was criticizing the Fed Is Best Foundation, but was actually illustrating her own appalling lack of knowledge on the critical topic of infant dehydration/starvation.
STARVING KIDS DON’T HAVE ENERGY TO CRY STRAIGHT FOR DAYS IN A ROW.
They stop crying by the second day and start sleeping way. Too. Much. That’s when the high bilirubin sets in.
There’s many thing that could make a child cry continuously after birth, but lack of calories to expend is not one of them.
Kids that truly aren’t getting any food by day 2-3, you can barely get them to open their eyes and it’s terrifying. I’ve caught a few with senseless old nurses who are just like “he’s so sleepy”…YEAH HE’S PROBABLY FORMING KERNITERUS [sic] GENIUS.
For some inexplicable reason, Drexler appears to think there is no middle ground between getting adequate calories and getting none. A baby will cry when he is hungry; if breastmilk is insufficient, he will continue to cry after eating and that crying will be powered by the calories that he did ingest.
Drexler’s nonsensical claim is hilarious, right? Not exactly. Fully 90% of cases of kernicterus (jaundice induced brain damage) occur in breastfed babies. The arrogant ignorance of lactation professionals like Drexler that is harming newborns each and every day.
I commented:
Why is Yashed LC trying to normalize infant starvation? Why is she gaslighting women who speak out about the harm to their babies and themselves?
Exclusive breastfeeding has become the LEADING risk factor for newborn hospital readmission. There are tens of thousands of preventable newborn hospitalizations per year at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars.
What is Yashed LC doing about it besides pretending it isn’t happening? …
Drexler had no answer to that nor does she wish to discuss it. But she needs to fool her followers by changing the subject.
She posted a long — and entirely irrelevant — screed to the members of her private group, ending with this:
Lastly, because she is wholly incapable of matching the strength and receipts [sic] of the trees she keeps barking up: tell her to meet me and KSA for lunch. I hear she has no capacity to have a reasonable conversation in real life but Kimberly Seals Allers and I would love to give her the opportunity to prove everyone Wrong! Never too late to change. I mean … she could be the OB who discovers how to cure breast malfunction! …
Oh, and because I know you’re still in here, the answer is in my and Kimberly Seals Allers we do these things in person. Full legitimacy. You can email me at … Make sure you copy KSA, since you are suddenly so ready to talk.
I responded that I’m not going to email her (just like I didn’t email Maureen Minchin) because I don’t trust either of them to accurately report back to their followers. Drexler is already insisting that any discussion take place NEXT YEAR, apparently hoping her followers will forget that I already bested her.
Why wait until we’re in the same city, Leah? I’m happy to meet you on Facebook Live any time, including today!
Surely you want to set the record straight and explain why you ignored my substantive claims, right?
Or maybe you just want to hide. We’ll see.
