Xref: utzoo sci.bio:938 sci.med:4304
Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!ima!spdcc!dyer
From: dyer@spdcc.COM (Steve Dyer)
Newsgroups: sci.bio,sci.med
Subject: Re: male breastfeeding
Message-ID: <696@spdcc.COM>
Date: 25 Feb 88 15:21:50 GMT
References: <1686@brahma.cs.hw.ac.uk> <9626@shemp.CS.UCLA.EDU> <1636@aecom.YU.EDU> <2055@navajo.UUCP>
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Organization: S.P. Dyer Computer Consulting, Cambridge MA
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In article <2055@navajo.UUCP>, baxter@navajo (Ray Baxter) writes:
> Well, I did not really consider the 1799 evidence myself in my reply.
> But the reports of diseases in which men do lactate seemed more concrete.
> Clearly male breast feeding is possible.

Well, galactorrhea in men is a syndrome familiar to anyone with some medical
knowledge, but that's a far far cry from saying that men have the capacity
for "breast feeding", a statement which takes a abnormal physiological event
and attempts to places it on the same nutritional and descriptive plane as the
normal physiological event in women, when in fact they are remarkably different.
In a syndrome like galactorrhea, the volume of milk produced is usually much
smaller than a normal lactating woman's and its production is much less
reliable; there's no evidence that men have the full physiological apparatus to
evoke the "milk letdown reflex" in response to an infant's suckling, and I
would be quite surprised if the fluid excreted (I hesitate to call it "milk")
was nutritionally adequate to sustain an infant.

Could you artificially try to induct a lactating state in a man given intense
exogenous hormonal manipulation?  Maybe, but I would still be sceptical of
the utility of what you'd end up with.  
-- 
Steve Dyer
dyer@harvard.harvard.edu
dyer@spdcc.COM aka {ihnp4,harvard,husc6,linus,ima,bbn,m2c}!spdcc!dyer