An Alternative to Breastfeeding

 There is agreement among healthcare professionals, infant food manufacturers and mothers that breastfeeding is the best choice for feeding infants during their first four to six months of life.

But, there are several reasons why a mother may not breastfeed her baby:

• • Medical or other health reasons may prevent a mother from breastfeeding.
• • Working outside the home makes it more difficult to breastfeed exclusively, especially if there is no support at her workplace for her to either bring her baby or to express and store her milk.

Antibiotics Aside

Even so, some skeptics are beginning to question antibiotics’ near-universal use for AOM — including parents like Rebecca Keith, a Seattle mother of two, who has experienced firsthand antibiotics’ law of diminishing returns. Her son Alec, now five, began suffering frequent, painful episodes of acute otitis media when he was one. “For the first year, he was on amoxicillin a lot,” Keith recalls. “But after a while it stopped working. So we went through a string of others: Septra, Augmentin, Vantin, you name it. Sometimes he’d have to take three different drugs in a row before the infection would finally clear up.”