How I Rediscovered the Ancient Secrets for Calming Colic

I didn’t realize how easy it was to calm crying babies (including babies with colic) when I began my pediatric studies in the early 1970s. My professors taught me that colic was often caused by gas pains – so there were two valid approaches for soothing colic: First, try Grandmother’s advice of holding, rocking, and pacifiers. If that failed to help the colic, try sedatives, anti-spasm medicines, or anti-gas drops.

By the late 1970s, however, these approaches were called into question. Sedating babies was considered inappropriate. Doctors stopped using anti-spasm medicines on babies with colic after several infants lapsed into comas and died. And anti-gas drops lost their appeal when research proved them no more effective for curing colic than water.

Although I’m grateful to have received an excellent medical education, I felt helpless when it came to caring for newborns with colic. It was shocking to learn that our sophisticated medical system still didn’t offer a single effective solution for the common – yet terribly disturbing – problem of colic.

So I began to research colic, determined to unearth every clue to explain why so many children were plagued by this mysterious condition, and I soon uncovered two facts that turned my alarm into hope:

1) I learned about the profound differences between the brain of a three-month-old baby and that of a newborn. A brilliant paper published by preeminent pediatrician Dr. Arthur H. Parmelee, Jr. in 1977 described how sophisticated and complex the brains of babies become over the first months of life. Dr. Parmelee powerfully demonstrated the massive developmental leap babies make during the first three months of life – and also the gap between how parents expect babies to look and act and their true behavior and nature.

2) While studying at UCLA, I was shocked to learn that colic is virtually absent in the babies of several cultures around the world. It dawned on me that our culture, while advanced in so many ways, was quite backward when it came to understanding the needs of babies. Once I realized that our ideas about colic were build on centuries of myth and misconception, the solution became crystal clear.

With The Happiest Baby On The Block book and DVD, I invite you to learn how your baby experiences the world, offering extremely effective techniques that I’ve used to calm thousands of patients over the last twenty years. Parents around the world have successfully used these methods to soothe their babies…and I hope that soon you will, too!

Tags: Calming Colic