to be annoyed about infacol

[entropygirl]

The NHS clincal evidence database says: 'Studies of simeticone have not demonstrated benefit in infantile colic.'

The infacol (simeticone) webpage says: 'Clinically proven to significantly reduce the frequency and severity of crying attacks associated with colic.'

So AIBU to be annoyed with them for extracting money from tired unhappy stressed parents when water drops work equally well?

ps. I will be taking the names of anyone who says ' but it worked for me' and enrolling them in a remedial course on statistics and in particular the concept that just because thing B happened after thing A doesnt mean that thing B was caused by thing A or in other words your DCs got better on their own.

Dh's aunt was insistent on us using honey for ds when he was going through a bad colicky stage, and went so far as to buy some for us and nag about it.

She was very when my HV pointed out that babies under 1yr are really not supposed to have honey because of the risk from botulism spores.

entropygirl I think that at least some posters in this thread are trying to suggest that infacol appears to work for trapped wind rather than for 'colic' as a wide and ill-defined collection of painful symptoms.

What infacol may have in their advertising is broaden the claim about simethicone's efficacy with trapped wind to the wider problem of colic. Simethicone is proven to offer some relief from trapped gas, so there is no reason to think that posters who have found it useful are entirely deluded. As for infacol's advertising ethics, I am with you on that one!!

So it may be that we're not all in such urgent need of your statistics class after all!

"may have done in this thread"

I used to call it DoesFeckAll.

That said, i can see you need something- you sound awfully tetchy

I found it useless as well OP and to be honest I was a bit about giving something that appears in shampoo to a tiny baby

DS definitly did have colic and Infacol seemed to have a good effect on his symptoms, however DD was just very windy and it did nothing at all that a good back massage didn't cure (used massage on both from very small).
I'm always open to suggestions on how to make things easier tbh and will be looking at trying water drops if it will help this time- I have no desire to do the screaming baby at 3am thing again!

Well ds2 didn't have colic but he did have a lot of trapped wind for the first couple of weeks. With infracol we could burp him and then put him down after a feed, without it life was hell. If that was the placebo affect I don't care, worth every penny.

it cannot be a placebo your babies are incapable of being placebofied (

Incidently OP - I do hope that you are not an analyst or statistician in real life.

I am a senior analyst and manage a team of analysts. An important part of our job is to speculate on the reasons why things occur or are as they are even when the statistics and evidence suggest that it shouldn't be the case.

If any of my analysts showed such a lack of logical, lateral and creative thinking that they stated: "Well the statistical evidence does not back this up, therefore it cannot be true and everyone who has experience of it must be thick / deluded" without trying to posit theories as to why it might be true in some cases (e.g. in this instance it possibly helps with the wind aspect of colic, thus appearing to help with colic generally and in the cases where it doesn't work is because wind is not a factor), then they wouldn't be in the job very long!

No statistician or analyst worth their salt would couch things in the black and white terms that you do - not least because even when things are seemingly straightforward, there is usually exceptions which prove the rule.

I agree with all of the pps who have said that it helps with wind, not colic. I have two dcs and have used infacol with both. It really helped dd1 with her wind and I swore by the stuff. Dd2, however, was a completely different story. She had colic for months and infacol actually made her worse. I tried it twice and both times she screamed non-stop for even more hours every evening than we were used to.

Looking back I can now see that dd1 didn't have colic at all, she just had trapped wind which the infacol eased.

Dd2 was only cured after a gp recommendation to switch to comfort milk.

its the parent that is placebofied, not the baby.

I found it a bit hit and miss for wind even.

Best I could say about it is it made DDs burps smell nicer.

It definitely worked for me with all of mine, if I ever forgot to give them it you really noticed a difference.

And it's made by the same people that make Sudocrem, now that is good!

lenak Firstly, I have not claimed that there is no possible way for infacol to work or that there is no subgroup of users for which it might be beneficial for treating colic.

However the same can be said for stuffing a banana up my own nose while singing the magic roundabout. But I am not attempting to sell that under the byline of clinically proven to help colic.

So the point is that in order to sell a substance and claim that it does treat colic you must actually demonstrate that it out performs the placebo effect, which averaged out over the trials done they have not. If they believe it would help a subset then they should find that subset, prove they are correct, and then put on their packaging 'will help babies in the following category'.

Secondly anyone who thinks that just because their child cried less after they gave them infacol proves that the infacol worked is in fact simply wrong.

In one of the trials over 50% of the respondents thought that the infacol had helped their child's colic only to discover that they had been giving water drops instead.

The plural of anecdote is not evidence.

Good lord, is there any need to be quite so patronizing OP? I think not, so therefore YABU.