Reflux - Any advice?

[StephP47]

I am breastfeeding and my baby is 7 weeks old and since he was around a week old we have had problems with his reflux. The symptoms he would show is spitting up large amounts (sometimes projectile through nose), frequent hiccups, we can hear him bring up milk and swallow it a lot, coughing/choking on milk etc and he then started getting a bit upset after feed times but not always. For a while I thought he suffered with bad reflux and spoke to the doctor about medication we was prescribed gavsiscon which helped a bit with his fussiness around feed times. The main issue we was dealing with was him not sleeping at night (even with us raising his crib) he would only sleep on us. It was really affecting my mental health and I was extremely exhausted. Since he was around 3 and a half weeks old we have been co sleeping with him as its the only way any of us sleep at night and doctor refused to give us any other medication as he was too young. Fast forward to now, I really want to put him in his cot again (I find it uncomfortable having him in bed with us and want him to be get used to his cot) but still experiencing all the same problems. My mum has had him on a few occasions overnight and has bottle fed him expressed milk, and he sleeps fine at hers feeding from bottle no problems/major spit up. I do not want to have to exclusively pump and I dont usually pump enough in a bottle for if I was to pump before his feed. I'm pretty sure a lot of this is caused by my let down/milk supply but I'm doing everything that the health visitor has advised with block feeding, upright feeding position, frequent burping, holding him after a feed for a bit before putting him down etc. I dont know what else I can do. I'm wondering if anyone has experienced similar problems and whether me switching to mixed feeding and doing formula at night would help or if I should push for medication again at his 8 week check up and whether that will help?

My DD had awful reflux, from 5-11pm every night! You have my sympathy!

I could be wrong but I don’t think there is other medication besides gaviscon. There’s things like gripe water and infacol but you’ve probably tried those. They can test to see if there’s underlying health conditions.
You say baby is fine with your mum though? Presumably because baby isn’t gulping a lot of air to get the milk? Could you express all the time? Could you just switch to formula?
I know that won’t be a popular choice....
One of my friends had this problem and when she gave up, the midwife said, ‘thank goodness for that, because we aren’t allowed to tell you to stop breast feeding’. Admittedly that was about 12 years ago!

Gripe water and infacol are for colic aren’t they? There are definitely different medications you can try for reflux, omeprazole, ranitidine (although I think that has been recalled) and powders to thicken milk etc.
Definitely speak to your GP again if you don’t feel the gaviscon is working.
You have my sympathy, my DS is 3 and still takes reflux medication!

Thanks for your comments. We often give infacol in the evening and he has gripe water which instantly helps with hiccups. But neither seem to help at all with the reflux issues. I'm planning to try formula feeding/bottle feeding breastmilk tonight and see how does, but I think I'm likely to move to combined feeding I enjoy breastfeeding so thinking I could just keep it up during the day as he keep sleep/rest in his swing to keep upright. Defo will still mention to doctor when I go i have heard of all those medications but they were really against giving me anything for him as he is gaining weight and due to his age also.