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There are some great natural ways to treat mastitis, and they are really effective if you can get onto them nice and quickly. As a naturopath, we specialize in postpartum health. I often find that mums will experience mastitis in the first three to six months of breastfeeding, and often when they're feeling a little bit run down.
The great thing about what I'm going to share with you today is these are not only great ways to manage mastitis, but they can also help to prevent it as well. The key is to getting onto these as soon as possible so that we can hopefully avoid you having to take any antibiotics. But mastitis can turn into quite a serious condition, so please make sure that you speak to your healthcare provider.
So, mastitis is a breast infection that usually results from a buildup of milk, milk stasis, or a blocked milk duct. It's very, very painful and it's common in those early months when you're still establishing your breastfeeding supply and you and baby are learning the art of breastfeeding. If there's any issue with your baby's latch or irregular feedings, these can all contribute to that buildup of milk. Breast milk can also sometimes get infected with bacteria, and then entering through cracked nipples, ouch, can cause mastitis.
So, I personally found the first and only time I had mastitis with my first daughter a few years ago was when she was going through a phase of feeding a lot. It was when she just started teething quite young at four months, and then when she cut back off, I had this buildup of milk, but it wasn't being drained properly. So that, in combination with me being run down, it just, it came on very, very fast for me.
So here are some of my top picks that I absolutely swear by, and as I said, do help to prevent mastitis as well by working on building up your immune response and controlling infection. So the first one is probiotics. I recommend a specific probiotic that is designed for breastfeeding. Kiara probiotics are specifically designed for healthy breastfeeding and clinically proven to treat mastitis. The probiotic strain is cultured from human breast milk, so the strain is specific to preventing and treating infections related to the breast. Amazing stuff. If you can't get your hands on that, any good quality multi-strain probiotic is going to be helpful. So you can start taking this during pregnancy, and particularly in the third trimester, right through to those first few months after while you are breastfeeding. And the great thing is that when you are taking a probiotic when you're breastfeeding, it gets transferred through to your baby as well. So probiotics do play a very important role in supporting our immune system. 80% of our immune tissue is situated in our digestive tract, so if you don't have a thriving population of healthy gut flora, your immune system will be affected and open to infections like mastitis. It's especially important to take a probiotic if you had to take antibiotics during your pregnancy at any stage or your labor during childbirth, etcetera, just to help repopulate your gut flora.
Echinacea is my next pick. It is an absolute wonder herb for the immune system. It's a great natural remedy for mastitis as it helps to clear the infection and downgrade inflammation and stimulate a healthy immune response. I recommend taking it in tincture form if you can get your hands on it through a naturopath or through your health food store, but there are also some great tablet formulations as well.
Vitamin C and Zinc are the next two things that I would recommend, as they work on specifically downgrading inflammation, helping fight infection, and boosting immune response. If you're getting sick quite often, whether it be mastitis or just run down, other other type of sickness, I do find that zinc supplementation is extremely helpful, as many mums are low in zinc from pregnancy, and then breastfeeding also, we have higher needs for it. And these two work synergistically together to help boost the immune response. And you can actually often get vitamin C, zinc, and echinacea in a tablet form together.
Now, to make sure that we are flooding the body with healing nutrients, giving our digestive system a nice break, and taking the burden off our digestive system, I recommend making up a big immune tonic soup. You can add chicken in there, or you can keep it vegetarian, but having all these really lovely healing minerals in an easy-to-digest form is really important when you are not feeling well and you're fighting off an infection. It's extremely easy to make, so even if you do have to make it yourself when you're unwell, you can literally just dump everything into the slow cooker, rice cooker, a big pot, and sip on that throughout the day or the days that you are not feeling 100%.
Those are the key things that I would use in a treatment plan for mastitis. As I said, getting onto them as soon as possible is when you're going to be most effective and have results from it. But there's also all other practical stuff that you may or may not have heard of. I'm not even going to talk about the cabbage leaf. I mean, if that feels good for you, I've heard that it's soothing, by all means do that, but please prioritize these other things as well.
A breast massage in a hot shower. I found this to be kind of like, you know when you get a really deep tissue massage and it hurts, but it feels really good? That's kind of what it feels like because you're literally helping your breast drain that blocked milk duct. The other thing is to keep feeding your baby, which I know is so painful. Your toes are curling every time they latch, but it does help to keep the breast draining. You could also express with a breast pump if that feels better and give that a break, particularly if you've got cracked nipples too. The breast pump can be a little bit gentler. And then, of course, rest and lots of fluids, which can be tricky, particularly if you don't have someone who can come over and, you know, help you with the baby if you're on your own. So just do the best that you can and try not to push yourself.
Now let's talk about preventing mastitis, because if you've ever had it once, I want to go through it again. Beside just obviously keeping your breasts drained properly, you know, monitoring how that's going with your breastfeeding, speak to a lactation consultant if you need to, but there's also a couple of other considerations that I will recommend. So looking after your gut health is very important, as I briefly chatted about before. It is the cornerstone of our immune system and our health. We need that to be thriving in order for us to have a strong immune system. So what we're eating is going to have a huge impact on our gut health. So we want to focus on foods as natural and unprocessed as possible, lots of plant-based foods, good quality animal products like meat, eggs, fish, including lots of healthy fats, a little bit of fermented foods, and minimizing inflammatory foods. I do have a video more specific on postpartum nutrition and even breastfeeding nutrition if you wanted to check those out.
So continuing to take a probiotic, looking at zinc and vitamin C as well, can be very helpful for mums. And then try to be aware of warning signs that you're getting run down, so slightly swollen glands or feeling extra fatigued. Just be mindful that that's the time that you need to pull back, really focus on your nutrition, focus on rest, and really focus on looking after yourself. We can prevent you being vulnerable and open to infection.
So I hope you found this helpful and it reached you in time. You can visit my website for more information on what we chatted about today. I have a free guide that you can download as well. Make sure you hit the subscribe button and like if you enjoyed this video and would like to see more postpartum related videos. Take care.