Maaike van Broekhoven RN, IBCLC
Monday, February 9th, 2026, at 7:00 PM UK GMT/UTC
Maaike van Broekhoven RN, IBCLC
I have worked for more than ten years as a registered nurse and IBCLC Lactation Consultant at the Tongue Tie Clinic in Groningen, the Netherlands. I have been a nurse since 1985, with most of my career spent in maternity home care. I qualified as a Lactation Consultant in 2001.
Throughout my career, I have remained critical of mainstream healthcare and have consistently searched for better, more natural, and more sustainable approaches. I myself was already experiencing many symptoms of B12 deficiency, tried homeopathy and spend thousands on natural approaches. Fourteen years ago, I discovered that my own sons were unable to breastfeed effectively due to tongue ties. This realization led me to research the subject extensively. As a result, I began organizing lectures in the Netherlands and eventually started treating infants with a dentist.
Around six years ago, I learned that I myself had been vitamin B12 deficient for decades. This personal discovery profoundly changed my clinical perspective. Very soon, I noticed a recurring pattern: after tongue-tie release, some parents returned because problems persisted and nothing seemed to help their baby. During follow-up consultations, mothers frequently shared long and complex histories of unexplained symptoms and diagnostic struggles, which often pointed toward unrecognized or inadequately treated B12 deficiency.
In follow-up consultations, many mothers described prolonged histories of unexplained neurological, gastrointestinal, or fatigue-related symptoms, often consistent with undiagnosed or inadequately treated B12 deficiency. Infants frequently presented with poor suck–swallow coordination, hypotonia or hypertonia, fatigue during feeding, reflux-like symptoms, and suboptimal weight gain and sometimes slow development.
I did this talk last year in Dutch, for Lactation Consultant IBCLC, recently I recorded this for IBCLC’s colleagues on an International Conference coming online in March.
Watch on here or on the B12d Talks channel