Gripe Water Alternatives

Video Transcript

"My name is Christine Marquette and I'm a registered and licensed dietitian with the Austin Regional Clinic and I'm going to talk to you about gripe water alternatives. A lot of people turn to gripe water when their baby is suffering from colic because it has been reported to actually decrease the symptoms. Now if you're a little bit leery of trying gripe water you're not really sure that you want to give your baby some type of liquid that you're, you just don't feel comfortable with, you may want to just try some basic soothing methods that pediatricians usually recommend. Sometimes actually swaddling your baby, having your baby feel tightly wrapped similar to the way they felt in the womb. A lot of times that can help with soothing them, putting on relaxing music or sounds that are similar to a heartbeat, often times also will calm a baby. You can actually buy CD's of white noise or of heartbeats that you can play in your CD player for your infant. Often times they will find that very soothing. Some babies like to be rocked, you can definitely rock your baby. Other babies actually prefer a slightly more jarring motion and some people have reported actually good effects with a washer machine that actually rocks quite a bit at a more rapid level. So you can always, again you won't want to leave your baby unattended, but you could definitely put your baby in a carrier, put them on top of a washer machine that does a lot of vibrating and just kind on hold the carrier on that. A lot of times that actually soothes the baby for a couple of reasons, the noise is one reason and the actual fast rocking motion is the another. Another thing you may want to try is warm baths, again a lot of times that actually simulates the womb and a lot of babies feel better with having warm bath water on their entire little bodies. So those are a few different things you can try in addition to gripe water or instead of gripe water as an alternative, the bath water, the rocking, swaddling, using a rapid acting washing machine with your baby rocking on top of it. Just a couple of things to keep in mind as alternatives to gripe water."