Question for the Day
Viagra, Levitra... All drugs to remedy the dreaded ED (erectile dysfunction). One can only assume that UNGODLY amounts of money were used to fund research, not only into how to give a bloke a hard-on but also to find which drug or drugs was safe enough to give blokes with heart conditions, or hypertension, or diabetes a hard-on.
Thousands of women struggle every day to breastfeed their babies adequately with an undersupply of their own milk, a syndrome which seems relatively new in large numbers. Think about it. If this many women had chronic undersupply before the days of formula many more babies would have died than the numbers of babies who did actually die... and admittedly there were probably a lot who did die. I am moved today to wonder how much money is spent on research into finding out which factors (environmental? physical?) are causing this epidemic of undersupply?
LLL will tell you that true undersupply is very rare and that several days nursing like crazy will drive up all but a tiny few mother's supply. Oh, how I (and so many other women) wish it were the case. I never had undersupply issues, in fact quite the opposite. I had massive OVER-supply. And no one could tell me then what had caused it either. More importantly for me at the time, no one could tell me what to do about it. I was thrust the age-old edema remedy - Cabbage leaves - and instructed sagely to make "Bra Salad". Didn't work. I had to resort to binding (a technique LLL advises against) to finally dry up my supply when I conceded defeat, threw in the towel and marched into the kitchen to mix up some formula. Yup, the very same tins from the goody bag I was handed upon my discharge from the hospital.
If research dollars are spent in such heaping amounts that we could conceivably give any man (no matter how old or sick) on the planet a drug induced erection, why is it that we can't give breastfeeding mothers a single new technique or medication to safely increase (or decrease) her milk supply or even to know what it is that is causing her supply to dwindle (or go crazy) other than bizarre folk remedies and speculation for hundreds of years? Some of those folk remedies work quite well, but again no one's done any research so we don't actually know why or even if they actually work at all.
This strikes me as exceedingly unfair.
Thousands of women struggle every day to breastfeed their babies adequately with an undersupply of their own milk, a syndrome which seems relatively new in large numbers. Think about it. If this many women had chronic undersupply before the days of formula many more babies would have died than the numbers of babies who did actually die... and admittedly there were probably a lot who did die. I am moved today to wonder how much money is spent on research into finding out which factors (environmental? physical?) are causing this epidemic of undersupply?
LLL will tell you that true undersupply is very rare and that several days nursing like crazy will drive up all but a tiny few mother's supply. Oh, how I (and so many other women) wish it were the case. I never had undersupply issues, in fact quite the opposite. I had massive OVER-supply. And no one could tell me then what had caused it either. More importantly for me at the time, no one could tell me what to do about it. I was thrust the age-old edema remedy - Cabbage leaves - and instructed sagely to make "Bra Salad". Didn't work. I had to resort to binding (a technique LLL advises against) to finally dry up my supply when I conceded defeat, threw in the towel and marched into the kitchen to mix up some formula. Yup, the very same tins from the goody bag I was handed upon my discharge from the hospital.If research dollars are spent in such heaping amounts that we could conceivably give any man (no matter how old or sick) on the planet a drug induced erection, why is it that we can't give breastfeeding mothers a single new technique or medication to safely increase (or decrease) her milk supply or even to know what it is that is causing her supply to dwindle (or go crazy) other than bizarre folk remedies and speculation for hundreds of years? Some of those folk remedies work quite well, but again no one's done any research so we don't actually know why or even if they actually work at all.
This strikes me as exceedingly unfair.
posted by Louisa at 3:40 PM
1 Comments:
Actually, Viagra was developed as a blood pressure medication. In clinical trials IIRC it was discovered to have an 'interesting side effect'. CV complications had already been thought out by that point.
Dunno 'bout Levitra.
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