What Every Nursing Mother Can Learn From Dr Olaitan About Breasts Sagging

Breast sagging is a natural process that happens to women,it can be as a result of age or breastfeeding where the breasts lose their suppleness and elasticity.

Dr (Mrs) Onayiga Olaitan, Medical Director, Lagos-based Queen of Mercy Medical Centre, talks about this and a lot more with Josephine Agbonkhese of the Vanguard.

On how breastfeeding make the breasts sag

There is a way a woman should breastfeed her baby. If you go through the normal position for breastfeeding, there is the likelihood that the breasts might not sag. However, in majority of women, breastfeeding makes the breast sag. This is because during the process of lactation, the breasts would have enlarged with a lot of milk collection in it. Eventually, after about a year when you have weaned your baby and the breast has to go back to its original size, there is the tendency that it is going to sag because of the space the milk had occupied before. But for some women, the sagging is more likely to happen if they don’t sit properly during breastfeeding; in a way that the child does not have to stretch the breast to feed.

On if bras can help breasts go back to shape after breastfeeding

There is a possibility but it is not to the normal size. What happens in a sagged breast is that the tissues are already loose, so, wearing some bras like the ‘packing’ bras, could actually help to reduce the looseness. As such, we can also reduce the sagging but not bring the breast back to normal totally.

It is advised that while a woman is breastfeeding, she should not leave her breast without bras because during these period, the breast is loose. So, it is better you wear bras so that they help to keep the tissues in the breasts firm. But most women believe wearing a bra while still breastfeeding would weaken milk flow… That is not true.

The mechanism of breastfeeding and breast milk production has nothing to do with bras. When the child puts the mouth to suckle, there are some messages that are sent to some parts of the brain and automatically, you have the release of hormones and the milk automatically comes out. So, the only thing that can impede breast milk’s flow is if the child is not sucking properly. But once the child is sucking properly, whether you wear tight bras or not does not matter; that will even help prevent the breast from getting unnecessarily engorged.

SOURCE: Vanguard

How assisted suicide is gradually becoming lawful in America

CALIFORNIA, America’s most populous state, became the fifth to sanction doctor-assisted suicide on June 9th. According to the End of Life Option Act, adult Californians of sound mind who have a terminal illness and less than six months to live are eligible to receive a prescription for a drug to bring about their deaths. The lethal dose is not quite as easy to procure as a course of antibiotics: the law requires patients to make a written request (verified by two witnesses and approved by two doctors) and to orally request the drugs twice, spaced out by at least 15 days. Doctors confer with the patients (reminding them not to take the drug while in public) and write the prescriptions; individuals wishing to hasten their deaths are obliged to ingest the drugs themselves. This means that patients who are unable to self-administer the medication are not eligible to receive a lethal dose of an “aid-in-dying” drug, whether or not they tell loved ones of their desire to end their lives before they become incapacitated.

In implementing this law, California largely cribbed from similar legislation in Oregon, Vermont and Washington. (The practice is also permitted in Montana due to a court ruling in 2009.) With the End of Life Options Act, the number of Americans potentially eligible to secure an early death rises to about 50m, or roughly one-sixth of the total population. But the option will likely remain the choice of few people facing the end of their lives. The law in Oregon, which pioneered doctor-assisted dying, has not spurred a rash of suicides: over nearly two decades with the Death With Dignity Act, only 991 patients have used the programme to end their lives. Another 600 or so who obtained the medication did not end up taking it.

Three-quarters of Californians support doctor-assisted dying; the law had a fairly smooth run through the state legislature, where it passed in September 2015 by votes of 44 to 35 and 23 to 15. Governor Jerry Brown, a former Jesuit seminary student, signed it the following month, noting that if he faced a prolonged and painful death, “it would be a comfort to be able to consider the options afforded by this bill”. Opponents of the measure include disability-rights, religious and pro-life organisations, several of which are backing a legal challenge to the California law in court. The president of National Right to Life, Carol Tobias, condemns the law for having “no real safeguards”. The End of Life Option Act, she says, “shows a blatant disregard for the lives of California’s medically vulnerable citizens and sends a message to these citizens that their lives are less worthy to be lived”. The “real goal” behind the doctor-assisted dying movement, Ms Tobias claims, “is euthanasia on demand for any reason”.

This charge may be overstated, but national polls show strong support for medical aid in dying. The widely publicised case of 29-year-old Brittany Maynard—a California woman with brain cancer who travelled to Oregon to avail herself of doctor-prescribed suicide in 2014—may have pushed support even higher. Slim majorities supported the right to die from 2010 to 2013, but in 2015 a Gallup poll showed that 68% of Americans think terminally ill patients should be able to turn to their doctors for life-ending medication. This year, legislatures in 19 states and the District of Columbia have recently considered right-to-die bills. The Medical Aid in Dying Act was introduced last month in the New York Assembly. New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, is non-committal: “It’s obviously complicated and controversial and it’s going to depend on how the bill is written and what the provisions are”, he said. John Flanagan, the Republican majority leader in the state senate, seems more resistant. “This is an area where we need to be extraordinarily careful and circumspect”, he said. “We’re literally talking about life and death.”

SOURCE: The Economist