Medications & Herbs Online Course(s) & Continuing Education

Dixie Whetsell, MS, IBCLC, has a Master’s Degree in Community Health Education from the University of Oregon. She began working with breastfeeding families in 1992 and became an IBCLC in 1998. She has worked as a lactation consultant in private practice, for county and state public health programs, and in healthcare settings. She began teaching lactation training courses in 2003, and has taught in hospital, community and academic settings. She currently works in Portland Oregon for Legacy Health in high risk maternal and pediatric hospitals. She also teaches lactation courses at Portland State University School of Community Health. She is an active member of the Oregon Washington Lactation Association, the US Lactation Consultant Association, and the International Lactation Consultant Association. She was a founding Board Member for Northwest Mothers Milk Bank, a HMBANA non-profit donor milk bank.

Associate Professor Luke Grzeskowiak is a clinical pharmacist and Practitioner Fellow in the College of Medicine and Public Health at Flinders University and the South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute, Australia. He is passionate about improving health outcomes for mothers and babies through the development and promotion of more effective and safer approaches towards medicines use. Luke has been undertaken research involving the use of domperidone for 10-years. He is currently the lead investigator on a number of projects examining the use of domperidone to increase breast milk supply in clinical practice, predictors of treatment response to domperidone, and causes of low breast milk supply. He is also the lead investigator on a large clinical trial comparing the effects of different doses of domperidone in the treatment of lactation insufficiency. He has published widely on the topic of treatment for low breast milk supply, with many of these publications cited in clinical practice guidelines locally and internationally.

Melissa Cole is a board-certified lactation consultant, neonatal oral-motor assessment professional and clinical herbalist in private practice. Melissa is passionate about providing comprehensive, holistic lactation support and improving the level of clinical lactation skills for health professional. She enjoys teaching, researching and writing about wellness and lactation-related topics. Her bachelor’s degree is in maternal/child health and lactation and her master’s degree is in therapeutic herbalism. Before pursuing her current path, Melissa’s background was in education and cultural arts, which has served her well in her work as a lactation consultant and healthcare educator. She loves living, working and playing in the beautiful Pacific Northwest with her 3 children.

Katrien Nauwelaerts graduated as a prehistoric archaeologist in 2005. She's the mother of three breastfed children and the administrator of the Dutch breastfeeding-website Borstvoeding Aardig, https://borstvoeding.aardig.be. Katrien worked as a volunteer breastfeeding-counsellor, provincial coordinator and training manager for the Belgian breastfeeding organisation Borstvoeding vzw between 2010-2014. Up tot 2018 she was the founder and president of Aardig Leven vzw, a non profit ecological organisation. In 2013 she became an IBCLC. Since 2013 she's working as a lactation consultant at her own private practice Borstvoeding Aardig. She became a nutritionist and a herborist in 2014. Katrien shares her experiences and knowledge on lactation consulting as a public speaker since 2014.

Amy Holmes has practiced as a pharmacist for 21 years with the last 9 years being focused in neonatal critical care at Novant Health Forsyth Medical Center in Winston Salem, NC. She holds degrees in pharmacy from University of North Carolina (BS) as well as the University of Maryland at Baltimore (PharmD). Amy serves as the Residency Program Director for the acute care PGY1 program at Novant Health Forsyth Medical Center. She is active in state and national pharmacy organizations including the Pediatric Pharmacy Advocacy Group (PPAG) and the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP).

Philip O. Anderson, Pharm.D., FCSHP, FASHP is a Health Sciences Clinical Professor of Pharmacy at the UCSD Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences where he heads the course on drug information.
Dr. Anderson has lectured and published extensively on drug use during breastfeeding including in professional journals and textbooks, including original research on drug excretion into breastmilk. Dr. Anderson founded the LactMed® database, which is part of the National Library of Medicine’s Bookshelf. He continues to write LactMed® records and to expand the database. He has authored the medication appendix to the popular handbook, The Nursing Mothers' Companion. Dr. Anderson is the Pharmacology Editor of the professional journal, Breastfeeding Medicine, and writes a monthly column on medication use during breastfeeding for the journal. He has also been a consultant to the US Food and Drug Administration on the topic of drug labeling with respect to use during lactation.

Marie Zahorick, MS, APRN, FNP-C, IBCLC became a La Leche League Leader in 1999 and an IBCLC in 2005. After several years of working as a hospital-based bilingual Spanish-speaking IBCLC, she attended nursing school and eventually became a board-certified Family Nurse Practitioner. In the meantime, she continued working as a hospital-based lactation consultant doing inpatient, outpatient, and Level III NICU lactation. She did not get much sleep.

After graduate school, Marie was recruited to work as a nurse practitioner in psychiatry. She was fellowship-trained to manage patients in the acute inpatient setting, partial hospitalization, outpatient office, and OB patients in the general hospital setting.

She specializes in women’s psychiatry, especially medical management of women who are pregnant or lactating. Her expertise also includes general psychopharmacology. She is experienced at diagnosing and treating mental conditions such as bipolar disorder, perinatal/postpartum mood and anxiety disorders, postpartum psychosis, obsessive-compulsive disorder, premenstrual and perimenopausal mood disorders, and personality disorders.

She lives in the Chicago area with her husband and three adult children in the transient stage of life. Her children all breastfed for at least two years but now just make faces when confronted with that fact.