I just wrote an email back to someone who had asked me about Probiotics and I'll copy what I wrote on here for anyone stumbling upon the blog ....
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We've had an enormous improvement in Tabitha over the last few days. As is often the case though, having thrown everything at the problem we've now seen this huge difference and I'm not sure which individual thing helped.....
Certainly her bowel movements are much improved. They are far more 'normal' than they have ever been. She is breastfed and we're seeing the typical exploding bottoms that come from BF babies rather than small frequent amounts of dubious colour and texture than we'd previously been seeing.
She does suffer from reflux though, and I have also upped her medication for that because I think that was contributing enormously to her fussiness.... I think she was in pain, crying, causing excess gasses by inhaling lots of air, and we had a vicious circle. The higher dose seems to be needed as she gets bigger.
I also started using 'Hylands Colic Tablets' at night which are nothing short of miraculous. Instead of waking up at 3am and crying out in pain from gas, she has started to go back to sleep after her feed. This change was instantaneous the day we started using them.
If I had to guess I'd say that all 3 of the remedies are contributing to the improvement. The Zantac is stopping her pain and spitting up and stopping her inhaling so much gas. I have read a couple of studies which suggest that colic can often be a form of undiagnosed reflux? I think I might buy into that theory. I don't think reflux has to be every symptom on the list to be present and benefit from treatment. I think that the colic tablets are, as I said above, helping with the dispersal of any gas in the tummy and the chamomile in them is calming and helping her to rest more easily, and I think the probiotics are resetting her intestines and insides with healthy flaura and fauna which have been completely upset by all of the problems she's had.
PS The probiotics that I’m using are BioGaia ones which are liquid and live and must be refrigerated at all times (they arrive in cold packaging) and their website has some very interesting information on regarding studies that they've commissioned into proB's.