For the baby, that is. According to a study conducted in Toronto, babies who received a pin prick blood screening and were then breastfed felt less pain than babies who were ’swaddled, given a pacifier, or a placebo’.
I think the results of this study are pretty shaky to say the least. How do they know the pain-relief effect was caused by breastfeeding specifically? Maybe it was just caused by the baby being busy consuming food (although the ‘pacifier’ option may cover this). Or maybe it was caused by simple physical closeness to the mother.
A decent study would have also done controls with babies who were:
- fed breastmilk from a bottle;
- fed formula milk from a bottle;
- just held by the mother, without actually breastfeeding.
Unfortunately they don’t say what the ‘placebo’ was. I reckon if they’d used formula milk, they would have explicitly said so. As it is, the study can only make some pretty vague conclusions.