How can a lactating mother increase her breast-milk?

I have seen many mothers who get frustrated when they are faced with the prospect of feeding an extremely hungry baby; and knowing that, at that point of time, they are simply unable to get that much milk out ...

I have some suggestions on how to make your breasts respond to the increased demand of the baby; please go through them carefully. Although none of them are guaranteed to get you the results, I can assure you that your milk output will DEFINITELY GO UP!

1. Be positive about your milk and about your baby. Have confidence in your own self. Try and forget about the worldly problems that you face each day of your life and immerse yourself in the love you have for the child.

2. Take a small glass bowl and fill half of it with cold-pressed sunflower oil. Add to this about six to seven drops of fennel seed oil (available with aromatherapy stores). Heat the oil mixture a little. Sit in a quiet room and expose your breasts. Rub a little of the oil mixture into your palms and massage both your breasts - one in the clockwise and one in the anti-clockwise direction. Maintain the massage for at least 15 minutes. Do this at least once a day, and preferably twice to get results.

3. Keep nursing the baby. When it is sucking at your breast, pour, from a small container, with your other hand (the one that is free), a thin stream of dairy milk slowly over your breast so that its trickle rolls over the breast and over the nipple into the baby's hungry mouth. This will enable the baby to suckle without fighting your nipple and the happiness that this causes in you will, in turn, increase your milk production as well as let-down.

4. There are herbal preparations that can increase the flow of milk when used regularly. Ask your doctor for details.

Hope this helps the harried mom.

A crying baby

When a baby cries, parents get extremely worried and immediately consider calling the pediatrician or taking the baby to the doctor. This is a very natural thing to do as parents think there must be something wrong for a baby to cry so much. In my experience, while about 10 in 100 children are certainly sick and need medical attention, almost 90% of the babies who cry excessively have no major problem and can be soothed and comforted with just a few simple measures.


While an entire discussion on causes of crying is outside the scope of this blog, the commonest causes of crying include:

• hunger or thirst
• stomach colic
• uncomfortable clothing/swaddling/too cold or too warm a temperature
• passed urine or stool and feeling uncomfortable
• has a stuffy nose and cannot breathe easily
• has pain somewhere, most commonly the ears, the throat or some place else
• is feeling bored or tired and wants you to soothe him, carry him, cuddle him or just talk to him

Having said that, let me add that sometimes, it is not possible to discover the cause - not even the doctor succeeds in finding out the reason in each and every case. In such cases, the doctor may order some tests such as trying out a feed, changing his clothing, offering him water, putting salt-water nose drops, turning him on the stomach and gently stroking his back, and so on.

If your baby cries without any apparent reason, try doing those things before you run to the doctor. However, do not waste time if the baby has additional symptoms like fever, refusal of feeds, loose motions, vomiting, a bad cough or running nose, or almost anything else that you, as a parent, do not understand.

Among all the causes that I have listed, stomach colic is by far the most common cause of excessive crying in infants less than four months old. When the pain comes, the baby draws his legs upto this stomach, clenches his fists, and starts crying loudly. The stomach feels tight. He may vomit some milk or curd from a previous feed, and will stop suckling when the pain occurs. The problem tends to subside on its own within two or three minutes. It recurs almost every night; the good news is that although it looks bad, there is no long-term problem with it and babies almost always outgrow this condition in three to four months.

One word of advice. Most mothers think that if their baby is crying, it means that they don't have sufficient milk and therefore the baby remains hungry. This is almost always NOT TRUE. However, the ensuing panic may actually cause so much tension in the mother's mind that she may stop secreting the right quantity of milk as a result.

Introduction

Hello. Most people who know who I am aren't fazed much by my unconventional and practical approach to children and their myriad problems. As they say, "I am like that only". I am, of course, a qualified Pediatrician with over twenty years of practice behind me. I graduated from the Seth G.S.Medical College and the K.E.M. Hospital, Mumbai. (To read more about these institutions, click here and here.)

Today, I am an active consulting online expert on http://www.healthcaremagic.com/ (see my profile here). Besides these activities that I sustain with regular inputs on the net, I am an avid internet surfer, a voracious reader and a busy practitioner. I have also written a book on Parenting, but the  book is out of print at present.

In this blog, I am going to write about common topics of child-care that trouble parents from all over the world. I will try and use simple language and keep the advice easy to replicate. Wherever possible, I will try and provide evidence to support my line of treatment/advice. I urge readers to send me requests for topics so that I can make this blog really worthwhile.

Thank you all for reading this.