Just read about Neifert's 5%....  AAAAAARRRRRRGGGGHHHH!  As an
epidemiologist I cringe at what she has done.  It is completely
and entire inappropriate for her to assume that her population is
representative of all.  In fact, I would say many women present to
her simply because they are having problems.  And also,
socio-economically, the poor are probaby very under-represented..

The correct way to study this 5% thing would be to choose a
representative sample of patients and test their breastfeeding
abilities.  By representative that means one would have to control
for all tpyes of things which affect breastfeeding ability (called
confounders).. things like previous breast surgery, inverted
nipples...  plus the ages of the women would need to be matched to
the general child-rearing population.   Since the statistic is
MOTHER based, the reasons for failure could not hae anything to do
with the babies, therefore, only mothers whose babies could latch
on and suck properly should be studied...

Anyway, sorry.. I HAD to comment!!  I do remember that La Leche
has  published some sort of compendium of breastfeeding articles?
 Is there anything in there?

Also, i was recently reading an interesting BF article from
Journal of Pediatrics.  The intention was to study why people
chose their method of feeding.  The general conclusion was that
mothers who choose to BF did so because of BABY related reasons,
mothers who chose not to BF, do so for MOTHER related reasons...
HMMM..

Wendy Funk, MS
MCH Epidemiologist
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