I really despise these drops and the way they are marketed. Firstly, Colief is targeted at parents whose babies have colic. Now if you have never been through this, you will have no idea what it is like to have to listen to your newborn child scream seemingly in unbearable agony for hours on end. You will be beside yourself, distressed and wishing you could make life happier for them. You will be desperate for something, anything, that might help.

So you try Infacol. What if that doesn't work? You hold on until LO is a month old then you try gripe water. Or in the meantime you fork out £60 a week for the twice-weekly chiropractic or cranial osteopathic sessions that so-and-so up the road swears by.

In short, you will try anything and pay anything (if you can afford it) to try and ease your poor baby's suffering.

Then you talk to your Health Visitor because nothing so far has worked. She, as the expert on such matters, advises you to go to the doctor and demand to be prescribed Colief. It is the best cure for colic that there is....

So you troop off to the surgery, confident that the end is in sight. Soon you will all get a decent night's sleep and the screaming will be over.

Sure enough, when you describe the hours of crying you are having every day, he duly agrees to prescribe this miracle potion. You can also buy it in pharmacies for £9.99 over the counter but please don't do this when you can have it prescribed for free!

Now to start, it is not easy to administer. You have to add 4 drops to every feed....but what if you are breastfeeding and LO refuses a bottle? You have to express 10mls each feed and feed with a syringe if necessary. What if you can't express? Well you have to try, even though you can't get a drop out as LO is comfort feeding as frequently as 40 minutes out of every hour!
It has to be given in milk.

The bottle is tiny so we were needing another one every few days as to give every feed when baby feeds at least 12 times a day takes a lot of Colief, let me tell you!

I kept giving Infacol, Gripe Water, Colief and going to see the chiropractor twice a week for a couple of weeks but when I saw no improvement I started to question the reasoning behind what I was doing. I resolved to find out exactly WHAT Colief was. What was I actually giving my baby in my desperation to cure his colic?

Now I'm sure you're now expecting me to reveal something really awful about Colief which I discovered.

Well, you're going to be disappointed if so. There is nothing bad about it, but I do not believe in just throwing medicines down my own neck for no reason, let alone my newborn baby's.

I looked extensively online to find out about it, when the answer is actually right there on the box...a classic case of not being able to see the wood for the trees.

It is a safe and natural way to reduce the hours of colic-induced crying allowing BABIES WITH LACTASE DEFICIENCY (the enzyme that breaks down lactose in milk) to comortably feed as colief breaks down the lactose in their milk for them. It compensates for 'a POSSIBLE lack in lactase deficiency' (quoted from www.colief.com, the product's website).

Now I can see that someone without a baby might be confused about my point now - but colic IS NOT LACTASE DEFICIENCY. Google it. Colic is actually unexplained prolonged periods of crying in young babies.

Colief will work wonders if your baby DOES have lactase deficiency, but most don't and therefore it will do nothing.

I am upset and angry about the way it is marketed by health professionals as they do not explain this. They do not tell you it is worth a try but it will only work if baby is lactose intolerant at first (before their digestive system matures at 3-4 months old).

If they had, I would still have tried it (I would have tried anything), but I certainly would not have pinned my hopes on it working.

The only thing that helped was reaching the magic 3 month mark.