Monday, February 16, 2009

Treatment for Acid Reflux in Babies

There is a wide variety of treatment options when dealing with acid reflux and babies. A baby's digestive system is so immature and needs something gentle. Some of the products we tried were:

1. Colic Calm. We really liked this product. We found great reviews and felt great knowing that it was an all natural product. The only negative feedback was that it is black (due to the vegetable charcoal) and that wasn't as bad as I thought it would. Granted, he would spit up once in a while and his bib would get black, but would come out when you pre-treated it.

2. Prevacid. This did help him, but it treated the symptoms (spitting up, etc...) and wasn't treating the root of the problem. Which is his tummy wasn't digesting his milk. Plus, it was expensive. I think we have good health insurance, but it was still costing us $50 a month for the Prevacid. Side effects (according to drugs.com) are:
  • headache;

  • nausea, stomach pain;

  • diarrhea; or

  • constipation

The strange thing is when I picked up the prescription from the pharmacy, the list of side effects said 'none'. We didn't want to keep him on this for a long time, so we continued our research of all natural things that could help his reflux.

3. Probiotics. More to come on this one.

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Acid Reflux in Babies - Our Story

When our first child was born - he was a great baby. Very healthy - no issues with eating, slept great, not sick very often. We heard from so many other people, "you have no idea how good you have it". We didn't. We had nothing else to compare it to.

Three and half years later, our next son with born. Just like our first son, I was going to breastfeed him for as long as I could. An odd thing happened; however, he was miserable after feedings! We thought it was what I was eating. So I eliminated dairy, thinking this was an obvious culprit. This was a sacrifice - I'm from WI. But that didn't seem to help. So I started cutting out other things like eggs. STILL didn't help. I wasn't getting sleep - neither was my husband. It was awful. I chalked it up to colic.

We ordered colic calm and it helped! Hooray! But it would last for a couple of hours. Thankfully, this was all natural and we could keep giving it to him. This wasn't ideal for us since the symptoms were lasting hours. I started doing research and realized that he must have reflux. He was acting consistent with the symptoms - arching his back when eating, crying during feedings, spitting up massive amounts of milk, not sleeping for long periods of time.

We went to the pediatrician and she agreed - it was reflux and she prescribed Prevacid.

Prevacid is expensive. It's not natural. We didn't want our son to be dependent on pharmaceuticals at such a tiny little age. We wanted to find something that would correct the reflux. Not something that would just temporarily help. And then we found probiotics.