Hi Pamela,

These numbers don't add up. Part way through the article, you say that in women without a known physical cause of delayed lactogenesis, only 0.1% are unable to produce any breastmilk *at all*. But further on, you say that 99.9% of mothers will provide enough milk for their baby. Since the number of women who *do* have physical causes of delayed lactogenesis certainly isn't zero, and nor is the number of women who can produce some breastmilk but not enough to fully meet a baby's needs, the total percentage who can produce sufficient milk must be less than 99.9%. (Although I quite agree that if a woman is ultimately satisfied with her experience of feeding her infant, that should count as success, not failure, regardless of whether she ticks the 'exclusive breastfeeding' box.)

By the way, I always thought the '5%' statistic was a misquoting of Marianne Neifert's findings that between 1% and 5% cannot produce enough milk to breastfeed exclusively. It's easy to see how that could be correctly quoted as 'up to 5% of women' and then well-intentionally misremembered/misquoted as '5% of women'. More accurately, the 1 - 5% estimate was considered the best available last time I checked (although, to be fair, that was a few years ago and if I've missed any updates in the research on that score I'm happy to hear about them.)


Best wishes,

Dr Sarah Vaughan, MB ChB MRCGP

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