Talk:Male lactation

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Male lactation is a fairly rare thing. Maybe it happens more often now that medical treatments for things like prostate cancer may alter hormonal balances, but the patients and their doctors have an obvious explanation for what is happening and so have no reason to write about it. But for it to occur under other circumstances is uncommon -- unless one is a fruit bat. John Money has written about it from a medical standpoint, perhaps in Gay, Straight, and In-Between (he has written a great number of books and information on this subject might find its way into any one of them). I've read personal accounts written by people who say that after their wife died they let their newborn baby suck on their own breast to serve as a pacifier, and the end result was that they started lactating. When you can't get canned or dried infant formula, any amount of milk may be precious. But a man doesn't have much to offer even if he does start lactating. That kind of report gets carried in places like the tabloids -- but in the same tabloids you will see pictures of Bill Clinton talking to ET's parents in the Rose Garden, so you never quite know what to believe. I'll try to remember to keep an eye out for anything that shows up in the scientific literature and incorporate it into the article. Meanwhile, Wikipedia seems not to have lost readers in droves. Probably the people who might have been shocked by the idea of something perfectly normal but very unusual went to check out the articles on certain body parts, were turned into pillars of salt at that point, and so never made it to this article much less to its talk page. ;-)

I am guessing, but it is part of the normal process of lactation that it needs to increase as the infant increases in size. Probably suckling serves to promote secretion of hormones that promote lactation. It should be possible to find articles on this subject. Injections could supply the same hormones directly. They may be feedin some hormones to milk cows to make them lactate more. Probably there are studies on those hormones, too. P0M 07:29, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

"But a man doesn't have much to offer even if he does start lactating." Do you have any source to support that claim? --kissekatt 13:03, 31 March 2007 (UTC)
There is unlikely to be any empirical evidence for the amount of milk provided by male lactation in humans because it is such a rare occurrence and because getting scientific about it would require tracking cases down and making a series of measurements on each.
I would be surprised if there is any objection to the idea that milk produced is a function of the amount of mammary tissue involved. As far as I know, the amount of mammary tissue each human has is a "nature and nurture" question. Although malnutrition during childhood and adolescent development might limit the phenotypic characteristics of an individual, there would be no way to increase mammary tissue beyond the genotypic size. (If there were, there might be people opting for that procedure rather than surgical breast enlargements.)
The biography of one late 16th century China individual reveals that bovine milk or other natural milk may be unavailable when a mother dies in childbirth. In such cases, the availability of small quantities of human milk provided by a male might keep an infant alive until he or she developed to the point of being able to accept solid food. So the low volume of milk might not make it a meaningless amount in crucial cases.
If anyone can find evidence that some male human has produced enough milk to nurture an infant adequately without supplementation from other sources, please bring it forth. P0M 15:15, 20 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] More Links

This article needs more links and more links that are authoritative. I tried to add the following, but (for some reason), UtherSRG objects to adding them to the body of the article. I cannot see why, given how lamely sourced the current version of the article is.

Poluphemos (talk) 02:37, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia is not a colleciton of links. As many users are told: "Please add information and cite the verifiable and reliable sources." These are wonderful sources. Please utlize them to support the existing article or add information to the article from them. Do not just plunk them down at the end of the article and feel you've done your job. Read the sources, compare the data in the sources against the article, use <ref> tags as appropriate to support the existiing article text, or modify or add text and use these sources to support your edits. - UtherSRG (talk) 02:51, 28 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] The Nofootnotes Tag

This tag, which claims the article "lacks in-text citations", was recently added to the article. It is a little mysterious, since I count five in-text citations in the present article, and I'm positive that all five were there at the time the tag was added. Furthermore, most - if not all - of the claims in the article seem well-sourced, based on those five footnoted refs; so it seems just a mistake to add a tag that says, "its sources remain unclear". Not to mention that the addition of the tag (assuming it wasn't unintentional) is a little insulting to those contributors who took the trouble to source the claims and add the notes. Such tagging seems only to discourage well-meaning and substantive contributions to wikipedia. Poluphemos (talk) 01:55, 8 June 2008 (UTC)

From the template: "This article or section includes a list of references or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks in-text citations." The bolding is mine. The references below are not linked to anything in the text. This makes it unclear as to which parts of the existing text (besides the properly cited text) is supported by the unlinked references. Hence the tag. - UtherSRG (talk) 02:01, 8 June 2008 (UTC)