When do you attempt going meds-free?

[Anonymous]

We tried at 9 months. It failed miserably. Like Laura said, at 18 months, she hadn’t needed an increase in over 6 months, so we cut the dose back. It didn’t seem to make any difference, so we cut the other dose. She did really well for about 9 months, but then started having night wakings again, so we started zantac efferdose at night time. I think she’s the exception rather than the rule though.

[Anonymous]

Kim, did the zantac do the trick for her at night (or was it equally effective as the PPI was)?

[Anonymous]

Yes, for the most part. There are some nights when I wonder if it’s actually controlling all of her reflux. There are other times when I wonder if it’s reflux at all or just typical toddler issues. I’ve actually been thinking about asking to go back to the ped GI and doing a pH probe to see if it really is reflux. But…. there have been enough times when I’ve actually felt her refluxing, so my gut instinct is that it is reflux and the zantac is doing a good job of controlling it overall. On the rough nights when it doesn’t seem to work we add some mylanta and that seems to do the trick.

Honestly, I would have pushed for her to go back on prevacid, but her last allergy symptoms went away when we stopped the solutabs, so I’m afraid to go back to them and I’m just not totally comfortable with any other form. Her ped hadn’t heard of zegerid and I decided it wasn’t worth fighting over it until we tried the zantac.

[Anonymous]

We tried aroung 7 months (no success) only because my GI didn’t think she really had reflux. Around 8ish months we did have success lowering her dose…we kept her there until around one year, when we lowered it a little bit more. Finally a few months ago I just said…let’s see, so we stopped the meds all together. (she was on a super low dose so we didn’t lower, just stopped) I wouldn’t worry about what the dr said about lowering to one dose…if your instinct tells you she needs it, I would keep on keeping on.

[Anonymous]

With my older two: One was off all meds at 3 1/2 years and the other was almost 3. With us, we tried to take them off (hate to medicate a child…) BUT, when we would take them off the meds, they would get an ear infection or a cold or something else that would aggravate the reflux and then without the meds we would have such a hard time getting back to square one – so we would have to re-introduce the meds and then that would take a while for the meds to kick in. With Carson, he may be on until he moves out of the house! ha.

[Author]

Posts