colic in the media

[Guest guest]

http://tinyurl.com/dr8g9

 

Adrienne Leeds

Certified Clinical Herbalist

Holistic Doula

Apprentice Midwife

www.charlestondoulas.com

 

 

[Guest guest]

Thanks for the story on gripe water, I knew it helped many. Wow,

between 10 and 50% of babies with colic ... I had a feeling the

figures were high, but never saw any before. If someone can get this

authors'email or phone she might be interested in more info on

causative preventions ...? There are lots of women in NY state by the

same name, that's as far as I went.

Martha

 

> http://tinyurl.com/dr8g9

>

> Adrienne Leeds

> Certified Clinical Herbalist

> Holistic Doula

> Apprentice Midwife

> www.charlestondoulas.com

>

>

[Guest guest]

Martha, I am not a member of the NY newsletter that printed the story on

colic so I couldn't read it. Are you able to open it and send me a copy? I

am curious as to what they wrote about it. Vicky

 

-

" Martha Oakes " <martha

<ayurveda >

Friday, November 11, 2005 12:09 PM

Re: colic in the media

 

 

> Thanks for the story on gripe water, I knew it helped many. Wow,

> between 10 and 50% of babies with colic ... I had a feeling the

> figures were high, but never saw any before. If someone can get this

> authors'email or phone she might be interested in more info on

> causative preventions ...? There are lots of women in NY state by the

> same name, that's as far as I went.

> Martha

>

> > http://tinyurl.com/dr8g9

> >

> > Adrienne Leeds

> > Certified Clinical Herbalist

> > Holistic Doula

> > Apprentice Midwife

> > www.charlestondoulas.com

> >

> >

[Guest guest]

HI Vicky;

This is strange; when I looked before, I did not need a login. Now I

do and cannot access. We have to ask Adrienne to help here.

 

(I once signed in with NY times and somehow got on a horrible mailing

list as a result, I still haven't figured how to undo it - IE,

mortgage cos and investment ops and all that somehow is what I ended

up with, go figure. So I " m quite reluctant to sign up again.).

 

Martha

> Martha, I am not a member of the NY newsletter that printed the

story on

> colic so I couldn't read it. Are you able to open it and send me a

copy? I

> am curious as to what they wrote about it. Vicky

>

[Guest guest]

gleefully violating copywright laws.....

 

For City Kept Sleepless by Colic, No End to Cures in Melting Pot

 

By NINA BERNSTEIN

Published: November 11, 2005

 

Nearly 200 languages are spoken in New York City, and in all of them,

the wail of a colicky baby needs no translation. Nursed, burped,

rocked, changed and cuddled, the baby still howls.

 

Is it indigestion? Gas? Nostalgia for the womb? Nobody really knows.

So in this city where 6 of 10 babies have at least one foreign-born

parent and pediatricians come from every corner of the world, a

cornucopia of colic cures serves as a kind of Rorschach test of child-

rearing culture in migration.

 

Doctors cheerfully define colic as more than three hours

of " unexplained crying " three times a week in an otherwise healthy

infant. It affects anywhere from 10 percent to half of all babies in

the first three months, and leaves glassy-eyed parents ready to try

almost anything.

 

" You would boil pork rinds if someone told you it worked, " said

Felina Rakowski-Gallagher, a mother of two whose Manhattan boutique,

the Upper Breast Side, caters to nursing mothers and serves as a hot

spot for rumors of remedies at the front lines of baby care.

 

So far, no one is touting pork rinds as a cure for colic. But little

New Yorkers are being comforted with Colombian cinnamon tea, soothed

with Egyptian recipes for rosewater and calmed with infusions of

anise seed, fennel, chamomile, or " hierba buena, " a kind of spearmint

plant that Latin American mothers and baby sitters seek out in

supermarkets. Others are dosed with " gripe water, " the elixir once

bootlegged from the former British Empire, and now sold over the

Internet in nonalcoholic versions with names like " Colic-Ease "

and " Baby's Bliss. "

 

Sure, methods from the heyday of America's machine age are still

popular: place the crying baby atop a vibrating washing machine; run

the vacuum cleaner full blast near the cradle, or take the wakeful

infant on a midnight ride (preferably on a route without stoplights).

 

But now, with more immigrants in the city than ever before, so too

are there more ancient anticolic traditions practiced down the block:

Chinese acupressure, Haitian belly binding, Mexican swaddling, Indian

oil massage, African cowry shell bracelets. And just as exotic foods

from distant cultures enter the city's culinary mainstream, these

methods are being examined and tried by the city's natives and

nonimmigrant transplants, desperate for any way to stop the screaming.

 

At St. John's Family Health Center in the Elmhurst area of Queens,

Dr. Lolita Uy has seen almost every colic remedy known to woman. Her

basic rule: " Anything outside the baby is fine. Anything internal, I

have to know. "

 

Dr. Uy, who grew up in the Philippines speaking Chinese and Spanish,

tends toward tolerance for such old herbal remedies as the chamomile

tea that Leonel Hernandez, a 2-month-old of Mexican, German, Scottish

and Puerto Rican descent, gets twice a day.

 

" It's supposed to clear out your system of gas or constipation, " said

his mother, Krystina Hernandez, 18, who was using a constant hip-

sway, football carry and back-rubbing technique to keep Leonel's

fussing at a low simmer. " His Mexican grandmother told me about it. "

 

But Dr. Uy takes a dim view of the old version of gripe water, though

it typically contained safe spices and herbs like fennel, ginger,

dill, or anise, and is particularly championed by mothers and baby

nurses from places once under the influence of British nannies - the

West Indies, India, Egypt, Canada.

 

" One patient had a master's degree in biology and she told me, 'It's

wonderful, whenever they give the gripe-water, the baby sleeps,' " Dr.

Uy recalled. " Turns out, it contains 8 percent alcohol. "

 

In the 1980's and early 1990's, such concerns prompted the Food and

Drug Administration to order customs agents to seize cases of the

stuff at the border. Now nonalcoholic gripe waters have their own

followings. Ms. Rakowski-Gallagher is a second-generation convert -

and an example of how old remedies recycle through migration.

 

Perhaps the only retired New York City police officer who owns a

breastfeeding boutique, she was born in Berlin 40 years ago. Though

her own colic was dosed with British gripe water, as her mother tells

it, she was resolved to give her babies nothing but breast milk for

the first six months. Then her second, Jack, wailed for weeks, and

her mother screamed, " 'Give your son some gripe water or I'll kill

you now!' "

 

" I did use half a dose on my son and half a dose on me, " Ms. Rakowski-

Gallagher recalled, " and there was a miracle. "

 

According to a 2001 research review by American Family Physician,

such colic miracles are clinically unproven, or owe a lot to placebo

effect on parents. But to parents, placebo is not a dirty word. And

one study did find improvement from an herbal tea of chamomile,

vervain, licorice, fennel and balm-mint - herbs championed by various

immigrant groups.

 

" We're talking about a population that isn't used to popping pills to

deal with pain, " said Juanita Lara, health access coordinator for the

Latin American Integration Center. " They're used to drinking teas and

rubbing oils. It's going to comfort them because of the warmth,

because of the flavor. "

 

For Maggie Wong, director of marketing at the Charles B. Wang

Community Health Center in Chinatown and a first-time mother at 40,

comfort came from doing acupressure massage of her baby's palm, as

taught by an acupuncturist friend, or chanting the names of Buddha.

 

" It helps to calm me down also, " Ms. Wong said.

 

At a time when mainstream medicine is marketing non-Western

techniques from yoga to acupuncture, native parents seem more open to

trying " natural " methods - or to buying trademarked approximations:

a " Miracle Blanket " for swaddling, a " Lull-a-Band " inspired by a

Guatemalan grandmother, a teddy bear that makes womb noises.

 

Others have married into the real thing, like Gabriele Ortiz, 40, who

described herself as " half-Jewish, half-Italian, like a good New

Yorker, " and said it was her Mexican husband who taught her to

swaddle their baby, Madeleine, and calm her with a nightly bath.

 

Even for hybrid New Yorkers, some remedies seem just too exotic. One

Brazilian immigrant mother whose firstborn cried until 3 a.m. for the

first three months was urged by her Trinidadian housecleaner to

settle his digestion with a surefire home remedy: a tea made from

cayenne pepper. She demurred.

 

" I was desperate, but not that desperate, " said the mother, Danielle

Curi, 36. Native or immigrant, there may be no substitute for

experience, said Dr. Sandy Saintonge, a pediatrician at New York

Hospital Queens, whose family is from Haiti. She has counseled

patients from every continent on colic, in the process collecting an

international repertory of home remedies.

 

Then, 18 months ago, she had her own child.

 

" I wasn't prepared for the crying, " she confessed. Eventually, she

called her older sister, a nurse and experienced mother, who gave her

the best advice: " Just ride it through. It will not last forever. "

 

So the doctor put on her music headphones, held her baby close, and

danced through the tears.