What should I ask about my baby's reflux medicine?

Why we asked questions

We were handed a prescription for Ari's reflux and left the appointment without really understanding what it was meant to achieve. Then we sat in the car reading about it on a phone, which is the worst possible order to do these things in.

Asking is not doubting the doctor. We found that the questions were welcomed, and that the answers made us much calmer about giving it to her. We are not doctors and we were not trying to second-guess one.

What is this for — the spitting, or the pain?

That one question reorganised everything for us. If the answer is pain and distress, then the measure of whether it is working is her comfort, not the number of muslins. We had been watching the laundry, which meant we were measuring the wrong thing and would have called it a failure.

What we wrote down

Doses for babies are usually tied to weight, and a baby's weight changes faster than anything else about her. A dose that was right at 3kg may not be right at 6kg.

So: how much, how often, for how long, and who adjusts it as she grows? We wrote the answers down in the room on a phone note. We also asked whether it goes before or after a feed, because that detail was easy to get wrong at home and nobody had volunteered it.

The thing that made us most comfortable was treating it as a trial rather than a new permanent fact. We asked how long before we should expect to see a difference, what we should be looking for, and when it would be reviewed.

A review date matters because babies get better on their own. Reflux tends to improve as they spend more time upright and start solids. Without a review, a medicine started at six weeks for a problem that resolved at four months can carry on for a long time simply because nobody revisited it.

How we judged the trial

We kept something very simple: feed times, roughly how much, and a word about how she was. Not a spreadsheet. Enough that at the review we could say what the fortnight had actually looked like instead of recalling the last bad night.

That turned the follow-up appointment into a real conversation. It also, more than once, showed us that a week we had experienced as a disaster had in fact contained two difficult days and five normal ones.

Write these down in the room. We kept a pen and paper ready because leaving the room and trying to remember later did not work. Something always needed us, we got distracted, and the answer was gone.