The Malay Mothers' Perspective on the Usage of Galactagogue

Abstract

Breastfeeding confers a lot of benefits to both mother and child. Problems such as insufficient milk production may affect the mothers’ breastfeeding process and most mothers opt to consider on using galactagogue. We collected and analyzed questionnaire consists of demographic data and usage patterns of herbal galactagogue during lactating. To summarize, most mothers consume herbal galactagogue due to lack of milk production. A larger scale survey of herbal galactagogues used would be beneficial in future to the state of knowledge and clinical study on the most popular herbs.
 Keywords: Breastfeeding, Galactagogue, Insufficient milk, Lactating mothers.
 eISSN 2514-7528 © 2018. The Authors. Published for AMER ABRA cE-Bs by e-International Publishing House, Ltd., UK. This is an open-access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Peer–review under responsibility of AMER (Association of Malaysian Environment-Behaviour Researchers), ABRA (Association of Behavioural Researchers on Asians) and cE-Bs (Centre for Environment-Behaviour Studies), Faculty of Architecture, Planning & Surveying, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia.

Prevalence and the Determinants of Traditional, Complementary, and Integrative Medicine Use Among Breastfeeding Mothers in Shiraz, Iran: a Cross-section Study

“…The extent to which Iranian physicians prescribe TCIM products and consider them to be effective has been investigated in prior studies [35]. In comparison, the highest proportion of recommendations regarding the use of complementary medicine came from friends in the Malaysian study (60%) and from family in the Australian study (61.5%), showing consistency with our data [2,33]. In Italy, however, obstetricians/gynecologists made the most TCIM recommendations (44%) [28].…”

“…Interestingly, we found that 36.6% of breastfeeding mothers using TCIM were employed, which is less than the gures reported in the United States (56%), Malaysia (89.2%), and Sierra Leone (52.1%) [16,25,33]. On the other hand, our multivariable regression analysis showed that working mothers used TCIM about 75% less than housewives.…”

“…In our study, 64.2% of mothers who used TCIM had received academic education. This gure is lower relative to the United States (81%) and Macau (87%), but higher compared with Sierra Leone (5.7%) and Malaysia (18.1%) [16,25,32,33]. A number of recent studies have shown a positive association between higher education and increased TCIM usage [34].…”

“…In Sierra Leone, the affordability, availability, effectiveness, and safety of TCIM products contributed to their usage [16]. In the Malaysian study, most mothers (65%) chose herbal galactagogues because of their natural components [33]. Attention to these factors and planning to provide correct information to breastfeeding mothers should be prioritized by infant health planners at the national and regional levels.…”