Successful breastfeeding in a motivated one-arm amputee

Abstract

A mother with an amputation of her left arm (from the age of 4 years old) delivered a healthy infant at our hospital and was determined to exclusively breastfeed for 6 months and wanted to continue to breastfeed for 1 year. Whereas bottle feeding would have required two arms or an assistant, strategies were developed that enabled the mother to successfully breastfeed independently. This report details methods that can be used to enable breastfeeding in mothers with either permanent or temporary use of only one arm. The purpose of this article is two folds: 1) to heighten awareness of successful breastfeeding by mothers who have use of only one arm, and 2) to delineate successful techniques to assist mothers with arm amputations.