I’ve written about lots of things that are over-medicalised, including back pain and ADHD. But breastfeeding, as I discovered in the course of reporting a story about it, suffers from the opposite problem: it needs a lot more medical attention. Rare is the woman who has no trouble breastfeeding. Yet researchers have done little to understand their problems. There are just 300 or so studies on low milk supply in women (14,000 if you include research on animals like dairy cows)—compared with 32,000 studies on erectile dysfunction. There is even less research on how to solve such problems. As a result, many women give up in the first few weeks—often in tears, having tried everything.

In a recent episode of “The Weekend Intelligence” podcast I investigated why science and medicine have failed them, through the lens of my personal experience. I talked to the researchers whose discoveries may soon change that.