I got this as a shower gift. It has been really helpful and extremely efficient. At first breast feeding and pumping was very painful. So I rented the Medula from the hospital for the first month. The Medula (a $1,000 unit) is a great dual pump system that works more gently than my newborn or the Avent. It was nice to use the dual pump as I got used to breastfeeding. But once I got used to it, I didn't use the Medula at all and was using the Avent. The dual pump had A LOT of parts to clean (2 pumps) and was a bit tricky to manuveur holding 2 pumps at the same time. The Avent was very efficient in expressing milk, easily extracting 5oz. from a single breast in under 10 minutes. It is very important to have the pump assembled correctly (my husband still puts the valve plug in backwards no matter howmany times I show him) So it's easy to see why some women may have had problems. But once the unit is assembled properly, this pump works FANTASTICALLY!!