Quote Originally Posted by Bloozcat

So, was your 5-month old daughter a colicky baby?
Gonna go a touch off topic here but seeing as you asked....

I guess you could call it Colic although I've come to really dislike that term. Colic should be a diagnosis of elimination (IE rule everything else out first), but too many doctors jump to it as a first diagnosis. "Some baby's cry a lot for the first few weeks it's nothing to worry about" - I heard that so many times over the last few months - it's easy to say when you're not living with it.

Basically Mia cried uncontrollably for up to 7 or 8 hours everyday for the first 3 months, only after 3 months did she get into a sleep routine. At least at that point we could get some rest but she was still pretty difficult during the day. We tried a lot of things to give her some relief - alternative formulas, Osteopathic treatments, herbal remedies etc. Eventually we got a doctor to prescribe us Zantac which is an ant-acid to relieve reflux. She actually didn't have the symptoms of reflux and 3 different doctors told us she definitely doesn't have it. But thanks to the web I found that there was such a thing as 'silent' reflux, where a baby brings up their food but swallows it back down rather than positing it out. This means they get severe heart-burn like pains as the food comes up, but also as it goes back down.

The symptoms are that the baby is distressed after feeds and it severely distressed when put lying on their back (hence almost impossible to put to sleep). So I insisted that the doc prescribe her Zantac to treat this - after a few days we saw a big improvement. Now she has started eating solid foods and is almost completely better (solids obviously don't tend to come back up like formula).

Anyway the point is that I know a lot of babies are diagnosed with Colic when there could be other explanations for this distress. It is so so hard to deal with a cross baby in the house so based on my experience I'd advise anyone with a baby with 'severe colic' to look into silent reflux as a possible cause.

Rant over - back to guitars

Thanks to everyone for their support and encouragement!!!