Five ways to help prevent breast inflammation when you're lactating
Dr Pamela Douglas23rd of Jun 202428th of Sep 2024
| How to prevent breast inflammation when you're breastfeeding or lactating |
Why is this protective? |
| 1. Working breasts are often quite lumpy. These lumps go away with breast feeds. You don’t need to do anything about them, except offer your baby frequent flexible breastfeeds – and see your doctor if any lump persists for more than a week. |
For a long time, women were told to massage out any lumps. This caused deep bruises in the fragile, highly vascular tissue of the lactating breast, and increased women's risk of breast inflammation (and abscess). |
| 2. Offer the breast to your baby frequently and flexibly, without pressuring your baby. |
This makes sure there isn’t a build-up of milk which could trigger a breast inflammation. We can trust your baby to self-regulate his or her milk needs and your supply (once underlying problems have been sorted out). Babies are very sensitive to being pressured at the breast though, and this can accidentally backfire and create a conditioned dialling up at the breast, which we definitely want to avoid! |
| 2. Try to get rid of any breast tissue drag during breastfeeding (and also during pumping if you're doing that), especially if you have nipple pain. |
Breast tissue drag during suckling compresses or squashes the milk ducts, resulting in backpressure in the glands, triggering inflammation. Nipple pain is a definite sign of breast tissue drag. |
| 4. Never apply any pressure or vibration to a developing breast lump. Even light massage can be irritating to highly vascular, sensitive breast tissue, and should be avoided |
External pressure on the breast may bruise or irritate the very sensitive, vascular, hardworking tissues of your breast, which worsens the inflammation. You can think of this as being similar to a pimple or zit on your face. If you keep touching it with your fingertip, no matter how lightly, it is likely to keep worsening. If you leave it completely alone, your body's immune response settles it down most quickly. |
| 5. Avoid tight-fitting garments or bras or wearable pumps or breast shells and silverettes which place any kind of mechanical pressure on the breast. If you do need to use them, just do so cautiously, being aware of the risks. |
Any mechanical pressure will squash or compress the milk ducts, which are very easily compressible. 60% of your milk ducts are in a three centimetre diameter around the base of your nipple. Because your milk glands continue to secrete milk, milk pressure might continue to rise inside the glands if the ducts are compressed, until inflammation is triggered. |
