5 responses to “Using domperidone to enhance lactation”

  1. I appreciate your article. Could you elaborate how best to wean women off domperidone? I understood that this needs to happen slowly, but I don’t exactly know why.

    The practice I have been following has been to prescribe domperidone 30mg TID, wean down to 20 mg TID, then 10 mg TID . I learnt this from a lactation consultant. The rationale has been that if the supply drops we go can back up.

    Best: Vera

  2. In my 40 years of family practice I have never used DOMPERIDONE. In Newfoundland where I delivered about 60 babies the mothers considered insufficient breast milk as normal ,and found milk formula easier to cope with !
    Thus my experience with DOMPERIDONE is NIL..
    My practice in now 90% geriatrics.
    What Dr. Kara Jensen ‘Does now’ seems to me to be the acceptable way to go .

  3. Hi Kara,

    Are you willing to respond on questions regarding lactation and NOT necessarily on Domperidon.
    What are your ideas around frenulums and the recommendations to cut the frenulums of the tongue and now even the upper lip frenulum???
    I am highly suspicious of these recommendations, but have no academic data to support or reject that practice??
    Please you info and experience if possible,

    Eugene Landsbergen, family physician in Sundre

  4. Thanks a lot for your responses! Vera, at the recommended dose ot 10mg tid there is no need to wean off domperidone, although a lot of mothers feel more comfortable dropping one pill every few days. Eugene, there is good evidence to support releasing anterior tongue ties (http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/128/2/280) and see the Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine protocol (http://www.bfmed.org/Media/Files/Protocols/ankyloglossia.pdf). As far as I know there is no evidence that a “lip tie” affects breastfeeding.

  5. I have personal experience with Domperidone for lactation and will never recommend to any of my patients that they try it due to my experiences. My heart rate dropped into the low to mid 40’s with run of tachycardia in the 140’s without position or activity changes. I have had to do a rapid taper and these side effects and low energy lasted until only taking 20 mg daily. I’m now on an event monitor to make sure that the arrhythmias have fully stopped. I think that a baby having a mother is more important than breast milk

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