Dunitz-Scheer M.: Return to meal. Successful weaning from tube-feeding
Turmoil after Hitler’s war brought together the parents of today’s guest, Dr Marguerite Dunitz-Scheer ; she was born in the United States, reared in Switzerland, and with a marriage became Austrian. She might have become a musician by profession – that was in her family’s blood, and she attended a conservatory as a teenager – but instead, true to the principle of everything, everywhere, and all at once that has informed so many of her life’s trajectories, she trained in medicine. There, as a young mother herself, she was appalled to see how cruelly abused in the interests of “weight gain” small infants were, and how abnormally those infants responded to what should be a source of comfort, pleasure, delight : Feeding, food, love. Her analyses of video recordings of the gravely distorted interactions that she observed led her to develop programmes to restore more usual responses, allowing children’s innate drive toward learning and exploration to investigate food as fun, this whilst reducing the inhuman stress under which mothers suffered whose children had mis-learnt that to be fed was to be tortured : “You must make sure that your baby eats” only turned the mothers into the torturers. She has spent her career, then, in the behavioural paediatrics of feeding, based at the Medical University of Graz, in Austria, and today we are treated to an overview of that career -- her interest in the topic of tube feeding, the need for professionals to be involved in tube management and tube placement, and the many ways in which tube feeding affects child development, parents, and various social systems Literature : Marinschek S et al. Long-term outcomes of an interdisciplinary tube weaning program: A quantitative study. J Pediatr Gastroenterol Nutr 2019 Apr 68(4):591-594. Doi: 10.1097/MPG.0000000000002264. PMID: 30633107. Dr. Dunitz-Scheer´s favourite song: Ode an die Freude - Ludwig van Beethoven https://open.spotify.com/track/1aBkkvLvWRawhIj6qG93t0?si=070fb315a27045a4 ESPGHAN favourite Songs can be found on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0YIHKjxITLEm9XNyHyypTo