Poop Talk...Passing on educational info to parents

[CrazyEight]

Oh man, my daughter was the same way. She was ok switching from nursing to formula, but when we switched her to cow's milk at a year, and started introducing cheese, her poops were gross and she would wake up screaming at night for (what we could tell) no reason. It took a while to figure out that she woke up about an hour or so after a bottle of milk, every time. Finally I switched her to soy milk and cut out all dairy. The screaming stopped immediately, but her diaper was even worse. Horrible spraying poop and a red, raw, bleeding bum. It was horrible! We took her to the doctor THREE times, each time explaining about a suspected dairy intolerance and that we had just switched to soy milk. Each time we were told to keep her on soy milk, that it was just a virus, and that she "probably doesn't have a dairy intolerance anyways." I ended up ignoring all of this, took her off soy milk, and the poop stopped within 24 hours - she is allergic to soy milk too! We tried lactaid, and that worked fine. We were able to introduce probiotic yogurt with no problems, and up until age 4 she had lactaid, yogurt, and no other dairy. Now that she's 5 1/2 we slowly started introducing regular milk and dairy again and it looks like she's outgrown the lactose intolerance, which is awesome! I'll never really let the doctor's reaction go, though. He was completely clueless.
That's a really tough situation that you have - how do you tell someone that their doctor may NOT know best? Good luck!!

[bright sparks]

Oh man, my daughter was the same way. She was ok switching from nursing to formula, but when we switched her to cow's milk at a year, and started introducing cheese, her poops were gross and she would wake up screaming at night for (what we could tell) no reason. It took a while to figure out that she woke up about an hour or so after a bottle of milk, every time. Finally I switched her to soy milk and cut out all dairy. The screaming stopped immediately, but her diaper was even worse. Horrible spraying poop and a red, raw, bleeding bum. It was horrible! We took her to the doctor THREE times, each time explaining about a suspected dairy intolerance and that we had just switched to soy milk. Each time we were told to keep her on soy milk, that it was just a virus, and that she "probably doesn't have a dairy intolerance anyways." I ended up ignoring all of this, took her off soy milk, and the poop stopped within 24 hours - she is allergic to soy milk too! We tried lactaid, and that worked fine. We were able to introduce probiotic yogurt with no problems, and up until age 4 she had lactaid, yogurt, and no other dairy. Now that she's 5 1/2 we slowly started introducing regular milk and dairy again and it looks like she's outgrown the lactose intolerance, which is awesome! I'll never really let the doctor's reaction go, though. He was completely clueless.
That's a really tough situation that you have - how do you tell someone that their doctor may NOT know best? Good luck!!

Yours is a classic story and I'm glad your daughter was able to come out of this in what seems like a positive way. Soy replacement is also really really bad...unfortunately most just follow the dr's orders oblivious of the fact that they are as equally clueless as us to the real cause.