Did releasing your baby’s tongue-tie fail to improve your breastfeeding or other problems?

• Did your baby struggle to feed by breast (or bottle) following a procedure to release a tongue/lip or cheek restriction?
• Was your baby very distressed or even traumatized by the procedure and/or the aftercare or stretching exercises?
• Did you abandon breastfeeding? Did breastfeeding improve but not for some time?
• Were you stressed, depressed or traumatized by the experience?

Your experiences matter. Others need to hear what happened to you and your baby.

Scientific literature has long been skewed by the dominance of positive results. Negative results (where the treatment being tested had no effect) are statistically less likely to be published (Suñé, Suñé, & Montoro, 2013). This is a real problem in scientific research. Negative results matter because experimental failures help determine which treatments do and do not work.

Please send your accounts (brief or detailed) of what happened to you and your baby when you had a tie cut or lasered for possible inclusion in articles in which you will remain anonymous and any individual health professionals will likewise be anonymous, to barbara.higham@gmail.com.

There is no requirement to follow any particular structure in sharing your account. 

If you want to, you may include answers to these questions:

• Did you have breastfeeding support?
• How did you come to the idea that your baby might have a tie?
• What sort of health professional diagnosed a tie? What sort performed the release?
• How was the procedure(s) for you and your baby?
• How long did the wound take to heal?
• How was any aftercare?
• Were there any improvements following the release?
• Did you consult other health practitioners?
• Did you feel well informed, well supported?
• How do you feel about any part of the experience?

References

Kicinski, M. (2014). How does under-reporting of negative and inconclusive results affect the false-positive rate in meta-analysis? A simulation study. BMJ Open, 4(8), e004831–e004831. doi:10.1136/bmjopen-2014-004831 (Negative results are extremely important in science because they indicate what doesn’t work.)

Matosin, N., Frank, E., Engel, M., Lum, J. S., & Newell, K. A. (2014). Negativity towards negative results: a discussion of the disconnect between scientific worth and scientific culture. Disease Models & Mechanisms, 7(2), 171–173. doi:10.1242/dmm.015123 (Too many failed frenotomies go unreported.)

Suñé, P., Suñé, J. M., & Montoro, J. B. (2013). Positive Outcomes Influence the Rate and Time to Publication, but Not the Impact Factor of Publications of Clinical Trial Results. PLoS ONE, 8(1), e54583. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0054583 (Clinical trials with positive outcomes have significantly higher rates and shorter times to publication than those with negative results. However, no differences have been found in terms of impact factor.)

Teixeira da Silva, J. A. (2015). Negative results: negative perceptions limit their potential for increasing reproducibility. Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine, 14, 12. doi:10.1186/s12952-015-0033-9