Urgent advice needed: Paediatrician has suggested something and I am so NOT SURE?

[dejags]

DD has recently been very very ill.

As a result the little mite hasnt gained weight very well and is still quite tiny.

She is just under 8lbs at 7.5 weeks. Since bringing her home from the hospital, we have been having a nightmare with feeding.

It goes like this:

DD is hungry - screams for a bottle. I feed her.

One hour later she is screaming for another feed (or at least that's what I think she is screaming for) but I can't see how she can be hungry as I have already given her a huge bottle.

So I give in and feed her again, she falls asleep but she ends up constipated and on laxatives.

If I don't feed her she screams for an hour or so, finally drifts off into an exhausted sleep, then wakes up. The cycle starts again.

In desparation, I called the paediatrician this morning - he suggested putting baby rice into her bottles to thicken it (he assures me that this will not aggravate the constipation and may satisfy her apparent hunger). I was totally shocked, can this advice be right?

Can anybody give me a professional view?

Oh and when I questioned this, he says that Baby Rice is hypoallergenic?

Can anybody clarify?

Oh Gosh- something tells me its wrong, but surely he wouldnt recommend something if he didnt think it would work??

have you got a Health visitor you could ask for a second opinion?

i wouldnt do it, hypoallergenic or not

Sounds strange to me. Going onto solids is what caused my DD's constipation. Is your HV any good? Can you ask her advice? Or, can you ask the Paediatrician to check DD over to rule out other issues before you start giving her baby rice. That way, he has to examine her and then advise on feeding.

Is it possible for you to get a second medical opinion

if the paediatrician, the one who has spent years and year s andyears studying how to take care of little people suggests it, then why do you think you will get better advice from random strangers who basically only have the experience of dealing with out own kids?
baby rice in a bottle is definitly not recommended normally for newborns. however your lo has been very ill, the paediatrician would have some reasons for suggesting this. clarify those reasons with her to set your mind at rest. but please dont just do something that random people off the net suggest to you.

Ah - just read you are in SA. Not sure what advice is like there. Follow your instincts.

I was told to do this with ds when he was 2 months old in Germany. We did give him some but less than it said on the box and it seemed to help but at 3 months he needed it thicker. We got a special powder to add to baby milk. I didn't have enough mother milk to satisfy him - stress, infection, extremely sore nipples and no support or help at all caused it.

IME baby rice makes babies constipated - so much so that it was always the food of choice for anyone under 2 with a stomach bug here

It sounds bonkers TBH - if she is so hungry, couldn't the paed prescribe a high-calorie formula for a while? There are so many formulas (formulae?) out there that you can only get on prescription, surely that should be the first port of call?

you can also get fortifier powders for formula, btw

Are you giving her extra cooled boiled water in between feeds? This is really important for bottle fed babies - even more so in this hot weather. She could well be screaming one hour after feed because of thirst not hunger. Constipation could be due to not enough water. Formula is food, not drink.

This is only an issue with bottle fed babies because breast milk changes constantly to provide the right balance of food and drink IYSWIM.

What was her birth weight? And was she born at term? Was she light for dates?

This is a bit wacky, but did you see the 'secret language of babies' thread that Cod posted? Apparently if babies are hungry, they start their cry by saying 'neh'. There was a video clip link showing babies doing this. Soooo, if she starts her cry with 'neh' then she may well be hungry, if not then maybe something else is wrong...

3frogs, i thought of this as well. at four months i was advised by hv to only give ds1 water if he started screaming of r it during the hourse of darkness, (june july in england, so not dark for long) or anhour after the feed. but her baby is only 3 weeks old. which i s why i think sh eshould stick with what the paediatrician says, and/or geta second opinion from another PAEdeatrician. not us.
admylin, i s there any possibiluty of breastfeeding? perhaps you could express some? give your baby that in a bottle?

dejags - glad she's out of hospital.

Clutching at straws a bit here, but have you tried cranial oesteopathy? My DS1 was a yeller, and a few trips to the CO calmed him down......

and another thing - she could just be traumatised after what she's been through.
Dd2 was in hospital for a long time as a baby and did seem traumatised afterwards, and so did the baby of a friend I made there. Lots of sudden, severe crying etc.

I am not suggesting at all that water should be given instead of a feed, just as an extra drink in between. Of course it is very important that an adequate amount of formula is given. I think baby is 7.5 weeks?

I think birthweight and other parameters are very important. My last baby was 6 pounds at birth, so i wouldn't have expected her to be much over 8 pounds at 7.5 weeks. But OP hasn't given much information. Agree, maybe second paediatric opinion is the way to go.

cylonbabe, my baby is now 9 years old! I gave up after 3 months as it just didn't work. I did try everything! With dd I breastfed for 2 years though.

I think the baby rice your doctor is suggesting might be a special formula for very young babies? Ours was and the next stage from 6 months was different stuff.

I am so glad she is on the mend djags. I used to work years ago with a wonderful granny-age midwife who knew all the tricks of the trade. She was against early baby rice and laxatives and when there was the type of vicious circle that you are describing, she would suggest giving the bottle as normal and then a second bottle of cooled boiled water as second bottle if baby hungry, with a tiny pinch of sugar in second bottle. The sugar had two benefits - made the baby take the water like a trooper(!) and also is a natural, gentle laxative.

I used to recommend this v occasionally to desperate mothers when I was a hv and it seemed to be quite effective. Breast milk, incidentally, is naturally quite sweet and a v small amount of sugar in water will not damage unformed teeth or make the baby into a sugar addict when older.

Personally I think it's a bit odd to suggest this because there aren't many calories in baby rice and if your DD is hungry and not putting on weight then all baby rice will do is provide bulk not substance. It's not really addressing the cause of the poor weight gain or indeed the crying. You don't say how much she's taking but I'm assuming that because your FF you can tell and you're confident that she's getting enough in which case just feeding feeding feeding isn't really getting to the route of the problem. Is she sicky?

I wouldn't necessarily trust the advice of someone who had been trained to look after childrens health over my own instinct and the advice of mothers who ime have more knowledge than any text book as someone else has suggested.

If it doesn't feel right I would seek a second oppinion. HV is likely to just endorse your peadiatrician.

I hope you get some reassurance soon

baby rice in the bottle is a bad idea , IMHO , can cause issues with dehydration IIRC, which if a baby has been poorly is not good

feed as much as baby wants, and maybe pursue getting a higher calorie formula, baby rice is not really bursting with nutrients

Thanks all.

I don't consider the MN a bunch of strangers funnily enough. The support I received when Carys was sick and having been around for nearly 6 years has given me the experience I need to read through a thread and pick out what's pertinent.

I trust my paediatrician implicitly from the perspective that he saved my daughters life. However, we are in Africa, and I am not sure if his advice is outdated. I am pretty certain that other paeds in CT would echo his advice.

I just thought that it was really ill-advised to ever put something in a baby's bottle.

I am going to speak to the paediatrician again and see what he says.