Treatment for Oral Thrush

[wickedfairy]

Hi,

Have been reading lots of older threads on here regarding treatment of oral thrush when breastfeeding, but I still have some questions, hopefully some of you could answer (sorry, I know this may be repeating a few things....)

DD is 16 days old and has been prescribed Nystatin liquid stuff and I have been prescribed clotrimazole cream to put on my nipples.

Dose for DD is 1ml, 4 times a day - I would have thought that some after every feed would be better (but then I am not a doctor!). Is this the usual dose?

For me - I do have some pains in my breasts after feeding but have now just read that usually you are prescribed an oral pill (F-something) to combat this. Do you think the cream will be enough to treat me? Pain is not horrendous like some others report, but I am worried that it may get worse and want to nip it in the bud....

Only asking because it was a young male doctor (new to surgery) and he had to look up his books for both treatments before writing the prescription!

Any advice most welcome, thanks in advance!

We found Nystatin to be absolutely useless for treating baby's mouth. We had much better luck with Daktarin Oral Gel. You can get it over the counter at the chemist.

i also used daktarin oral gel, was better than nystatin.

My pharmacist told me the instructions for using Nystatin were pretty useless as it's a topical thing and if the baby just swallows it's not going to do much good. He advised us to rub it onto gums, cheeks etc using a clean finger instead. I'd defo recommend getting Fluconazole as thrush is a devil to shake, I'd say hit it hard from the outset. Took us 3 rounds of treatment to finally get over it. (Although part of our trouble was a useless GP )Good luck!

I'd second the flucozanole tip - my GP wouldn't prescribe it (it's not offically licensed for BFing mothers despite being the only thing to shift it from milk ducts and it being licensed for babies in much bigger quantities than would pass through to them in milk!) so I just bought it over the counter (mostly from online pharmacies - much cheaper and you can only buy 2 pills at a time so need to go to a variety of places anyway).

A tip I've seen for nystatin is to put it on your (clean) little finger and rub around in baby's mouth - roof, cheeks, gums - and then let the baby suck off any remaining. We personally used daktarin and applied it in a similar way. Again, we needed two courses of daktarin cream for me and daktarin gel for DS to shift it.

Thanks for the tip re administering the nystatin! Was given a tiny syringe and slowly give the 1ml dose in bits in the hope it stays in the mouth long enough to have an effect! Will try the rubbing in via finger!

Got Fluconazole from the doctor thankfully, so have started that in addition to the cream.

Hopefully this will work, especially DD's treatment, as everything I have heard is pretty poor about the Nystatin.

Thanks again for all the advice!