The Truth about Crying Babies

Colic Solved: The Essential Guide to Infant Reflux and the Care of Your Crying, Difficult to Soothe Baby
by Bryan Vartabedian M.D.

For generations, doctors have been diagnosing babies with colic, offering little comfort and few solutions to worried, weary parents. But recent medical advances made through cutting-edge technology now reveal that many if not most cases of colic are actually caused by acid reflux. In this revolutionary book, Bryan Vartabedian, a noted pediatric gastroenterologist and the father of two babies with acid reflux, provides hands-on, practical advice about this hidden epidemic and how to make your own baby happy again.

• Recognize the seven signs of reflux in infancy.
• Discover the role of milk protein allergy - the other colic.
• Learn what, when, and how to feed an irritable baby and the best positions for sleep.
• Recognize the role of formula, breast milk, bottle systems, burping, and pacificers in your baby's fussiness, and irritability.
• Understand when and why your baby may need testing for reflux.
• Weigh the pros and cons of available treatment options.
• Identify when a specialist is needed and where to find one.

Complete with inspiring real-life cases of colic solved, plus tips, sidebars, and illustrations, this essential guide provides real answers to a problem that has been upsetting babies and parents for years. Help and hope are at hand!

Chapter 1

If your baby screams, she's not alone. It's estimated that about 1 of 5 babies have unexplained irritability. It's been 50 years since the initial pigeonholing of irritable babies with a condition that we've affectionately come to call colic. At the time that colic was first described, doctors had few means of knowing what was going on inside a baby. And in the absence of any better explanation, the idea of a five-letter word to sum it all up was warmly received. And despite what we have come to know, colic as a wastebasket diagnosis remains alive and well, a vestige of history and a comfortable place to put the babies we have such a hard time with. But your baby is screaming for a reason. It's a cry for help.

The Case of Baby Hannah

Hannah was 2 months old when she first visited me in my Houston office. Her pediatrician had referred her because he had exhausted all of his resources as a busy primary care pediatrician. Hannah wouldn't stop crying, and he didn't know why. The best explanation this seasoned and reputable pediatrician had was that Hannah had colic.

Her problems began at around 2 weeks of age when she began crying after her feeding. Her crying progressed to throughout the day and started to affect her feeding. The pediatrician advised that her mother discontinue breastfeeding her because he feared that breast milk was the problem. Formula feeds began strong, but after a half ounce became difficult, with Hannah arching, pulling from the nipple, and in apparent pain, all while still being hungry and wanting more. The frustration of Hannah's hour-long feeding episodes were matched only by her sleep, which was regularly interrupted with piercing screams and painful gas.

Her waking hours were marked by nearly constant hiccups and the need to be held and moved. Hannah's parents were told that she had colic, yet colic medication never seemed to make much of a difference. Formula changes became nearly as frequent as diaper changes, but nothing seemed to make a difference.

The baby's incessant irritability, impossible feeding, and unpredictable sleeping patterns soon began to take its toll on her parents. When her mother returned to work when Hannah was 3 months old, understanding day care was hard to come by. At the end of their rope with a marriage at its limits, Hannah's parents came to see me.

Welcome To My World

Whether it's a pleasure or not, I have the opportunity to work with babies like Hannah every day. Thousands of screaming, miserable, sleepless, and impossible-to-feed babies have found their way to my office over the past several years, some sicker than others, but all delivered by desperate parents looking for answers and looking for help. This book is about what I've learned and what I know.

I've always said that it was far easier being a pediatrician before I ever had children of my own. Calls in the middle of the night from the sleepless parents of screaming babies were handled as a matter of course early on in my career. But despite my comforting words, my attitude beneath was "Deal with it." I had bought into the idea that all babies scream and that some babies scream because of the stress and pressure that young parents convey to their babies. While I have always done my best to evaluate and treat every baby thoroughly, I was very much inside the system at first . . . a paternalistic, board- certified know-it-all with 6 years of residency and fellowship training at America's largest children's hospital. But I had never lived with a baby. More important, I had never lived with a baby with reflux.

The birth of my daughter, Laura, represented a turning point for me as a pediatrician. Laura was a lot like Hannah, with the exception that her father was a pediatric gastroenterologist. And with that came expectations from my wife to make things better. Laura was treated for acid reflux and morphed from a bundle of misery to something far more tolerable. I was vindicated as both a father and a physician, and my view of the screaming baby has never been the same.

I should note that my son, Nicholas, happily spit everywhere and all the time until nearly a year of age. But for us this was nothing more than an inconvenience. In nearly all of his baby pictures, he is wearing a crusty burp bib intended to protect the expensive outfits we bought him as the firstborn. So you could say that I've had it both ways: a bundle of misery and a happy spitter, two patterns that you'll read about in Chapter 3, "Seven Signs of Reflux in Your Baby."

For better or worse, I can now empathize with the families I see - for better because I can understand their situation and react to it more sensitively; for worse because I can understand their situation and relive the misery that they feel whenever I'm called to evaluate a screamer.

Copyright © 2007 by Bryan Vartabedian. Excerpted by permission of Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

About the Author

Dr. Vartabedian practices Pediatric Gastroenterology and Pediatrics in Houston, Texas. Dr. Bryan Vartabedian, a male, graduated from the University Mass School Med with a MD and has been in the profession for 16 years.