Blogging a Baby: Teething sucks

Infant Advil works great for me son. He's 13 months and in the throes of teething. He's only got his 2 bottom teeth currently, but I can see six, yes SIX teeth underneath the surface of his bottom gums. He wakes up every night howling and tugging on his ear. About 1/2 hour after I give him the Advil he drifts off to sleep and sleeps the rest of the night through. Now the only problem is that I've been giving him the med nightly for a couple weeks now. I wonder how much is too much...

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Hello.
I am from Bulgaria.Where i can buy Baby oraljel?
Thanks.

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It's not for the lactose intolerant, though. And my ped. didn't recommend it for my son (though he did for my daughter) because he always had the opposite reaction to things that were supposed to calm him down (like Benedryl). He'd get totally wired.

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While we use the Hyland Teething Tablets, you might want to mention that one of the ingredients in them is Belladonna - which apparently is a narcotic. (Depends what literature you read.)

I think they work, and our little guy is cutting 4 teeth right now so we shall be stocking up tonight :)

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They seem to provide some relief for our 8 month old who is also cutting teeth (continuously now for over 4 months!).

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Have you tried Hurrican Gel? It can be purchased at your local pharmacy, but you do not need a prescription. It is applied like Orajel, but it's much stronger.

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The crucial ingredient in the Hyland's Teething Tablets is the last one listed: "In a base of Lactose (milk sugar)". A little dose of sugar does wonders for a cranky baby.

I wouldn't worry too much about the belladonna, because that's listed as "Belladonna 6X HPUS". The 6X means the original source of belladona (extract or whatever) has been diluted _one million times_ (10 to the 6th power). Or, as it says, 3 ten-millionths of a percent [tropane] alkaloids (the toxic chemical in the plant).

The tablets are "1 grain", which Google tells me is about 65 grams. So, in each tablet, you're getting less than two-tenths of a nanogram of the toxic part of belladonna. That's NANO-gram.

I'm not a doctor, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say very few things are that poisonous.

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We use Hyland teething tablets and infant Motrin at the same time. The tablets seem to provide instant relief and take the edge off while the Motrin kicks in.

Something else we've found that helps get our little one to sleep is when walking/rocking/nursing, don't do so in complete or almost complete darkness. For our little girl it seems to make her more upset. She would rather have some light music (usually classical or light pop/alternative) and low lighting. I think it has something to do with distracting her from the pain of teething.

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As for the Belladonna - I knew a mom who wrote to Hylands to ask about this once. A child would have to eat *5 WHOLE BOTTLES AT ONCE* to even begin to have any problems from it. And even then it was some mild symptom.

Hylands are THE BEST TEETHING REMEDY. They don't numb them up, but instead works on the source of discomfort. They are better for nursing babies than a numbing gel as it doesn't mess with their nursing like numbing them up can do. And it doesn't taste as nasty. (I've used them myself.)

As for the Lactose - only the tablets contain lactose. They also make a gel which has no lactose in it.

When my kids were little they KNEW this stuff would help and would ASK for it!

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boiron ( sp) teething stuff is great. Camilia is usually available in the health food section in gorchery stores and some pharmacies.

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Momma2mingbu -- I don't think five bottles is going to do it either. One bottle has 125 tablets, 1 grain each = 8 grams. So that's *still* only 0.00012mg of tropane alkaloids. So maybe if the kid ate, like, 5000 entire bottles all at once there might be a slight effect. But probably not, because:

In order to get a dose which would be fatal to 50% of adult humans, you'd need to take approximately 33 MILLION bottles all at once. That's about, um, 294 *tons* of tablets. All at once.

I am not making this up -- you can do the math yourself if you want!

Same goes for all the other ingredients, except for the Calcarea Phosphorica ("phosphate of lime"), which is diluted *another* million times (12X instead of 6X), so you'd be looking at 294 *million* tons of pills to get a noticable amount of that.

And of course, except for the milk sugar.


This is why homeopathic remedies are perfectly safe. Logically, there's far, far less of the active ingredients than there are accidental environmental contaminants, unless the stuff is distilled in a NASA cleanroom.

And hey, if they work for you, good. But it makes me angry that people charge other people so much money for this stuff. A few weeks ago, the news that over-the-counter cough remedies don't have any real medicinal value was flying 'round the blogosphere. This is like that, except LITERALLY millions of times worse.

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Be careful with the tablets if your kid has a milk allergy. My son, the first time we used them, broke out in hives. Of course, this made the teething that much worse! The gel seems okay.

Also, be careful about giving Tylenol before 4 months of age and Motrin before 6 months. My son also developed an allergy to the Tylenol. We suspect the corn syrup in it (used it at 3.5 months when he started teething bad).

(We've had a lot of experience with food allergies in this house, can ya tell?)

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Matthew, did you hear that they think dark chocolate has more cough suppressant value than most cough medicines? Yup. Go for it...of course, you've gotta use the dark variety (I think, like, at least 60% cocoa solids). Supposedly it's just as good as codeine at suppressing coughs. Cool!

I'm a big fan of homeopathy. I'm so sensitive to a lot of artificial components of foods and everyday products that I find "natural" solutions so great. And yes, it's silly to charge so much for stuff that is so cheap to make.

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Missy -- sure, I'll buy that about chocolate. Even without studying it, it's at least plausible. But chocolate diluted a million (6X) or trillion (12X) times, well, not so much.

Homeopathy isn't really about natural solutions, though. It's about selling people sugar pills by claiming they've got ingredients they don't -- or, some sort of "impression" of the ingredients even though there's no actual trace. Basically, the homeopathic emperor really has no clothes.

Homeopathy also kind of gets glommed onto the idea of ancient traditional medicine and so on -- much of which has real value. However, homeopathy was invented in Europe at the very end turn of the 18th century -- it's no ancient wisdom, but rather a leftover of the whole turn-lead-into-gold alchemy craze.

And now it's still around, turning sugar pills into other people's money.

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