fussy baby

Acid Reflux in Babies: Another Red Flag

by Maria Rickert Hong, CHHC, AADP Acid reflux in babies:  Both of my sons had acid reflux as babies.  Prevacid wasn’t the answer; undoing their gut dysbiosis was. When my younger son was born, he, too, was “fussy” and “colicky”.  He had an outright problem with nursing:  he refused to. When he would, he would shriek in pain or fill up so much (probably because he was starving) that he would throw it right back up. Again, this wasn’t a little “spitting up”; this was projectile vomiting and, by now, I had become used to having stains on the rug, chairs and clothes that simply wouldn’t come out. The pediatrician referred a lactation specialist who recommended that I cut out all dairy products from my diet.  She said that dairy was the most likely culprit in causing pain to my son. Probiotics Not Enough She also recommended that I take a probiotic, “the refrigerated kind, like they sell at Whole…

Failure to Thrive: Red Flags All Over the Place

Some of the first red flags I had from my older son were his failure to eat solid foods, his projectile vomiting any food or breast milk he did eat, and, later, his failure to thrive. It was so sad to watch my baby dwindle from being born at the 40th percentile for weight down to the 3rd percentile at the age of 18 months. He crossed three percentile curves on the way down; crossing two of them constitutes “failure to thrive”, but he also fit that definition by dropping below the 5th percentile curve. Where Were the Doctors? Where were his doctors in all this?  Again and again, different doctors told me, “He’s fine” and “There’s nothing to worry about”. They said this even when I told them that he would throw up after almost every meal and even though his weight percentile was declining.  They told me that because his height percentile was growing (for a few months)…