Although my baby doesn't suffer from full blown colic, she does seem to have very colicky spells, where she can cry sore for half and hour to an hour and nothing will comfort her. I have now exhausted all available remedies on the market, starting with infacol up to this latest attempt at relieving some of the pain that my daughter is obviously in, by using these colief drops, which claim to 'reduce the hours of crying'.

Now, one of the major drawbacks of this product right from the beginning is its cost. At around £11 for a tiny tiny bottle it is vastly overpriced in comparison to the likes of INfacol and Dentinox, however a friend had advised me that she had got her colief drops on prescription, which meant I could at least try these free of charge. My doctor advised however to read the instructions carefully, as you have to follow precise guidelines in using this.

The second major drawback of this product is in its usage. If you are bottle feeding, you need to add these drops to a warm bottle (mustn't be hot nor cold) and leave it for 30 minutes, as this product is designed to work on the lactose in the milk, which should help with digestion, which in turn should help settle the baby. If you are breastfeeding, you need to express some milk and add the drops to it. Now I cannot comment on breastfeeding, but in relation to bottlefeeding, I found this to be a huge nuisance. My baby tends to feed every four hours, but can be earlier or later, and therefore I have to try and predict her feeding times, which doesn't always work, and I hate having her crying with hunger, in order just to let the drops have time to work.

I honestly started using these colief drops with great optimism that they would work and help reduce those colicky spells my baby daughter has. I was aware that the side effect of colief is a change to stools but I wasn't quite prepared for the very very runny nappies that my baby would have. I could however put up with that if I thought it did her any good, but rather I found the opposite. After a couple of days, there were still crying spells, however these were slightly worse in that, my baby was in very obvious pain, grimacing in fact, and passed huge amounts of wind, more than she would normally pass. Even when she passed wind, it didn't seem to give her any relief at all, in fact she continued to cry in pain, until eventually she tired herself out. My husband and I tried everything to comfort her, but to no avail, until we finally concluded that we had given the colief drops enough of a go, and would stop using them, as, instead of helping her they only seemed to give her further pain and what parent wants to see that.

All in all, colief may work for some people, and I know that my friend did think it helped her colicky baby, but for my daughter who only has some colicky spells, this only made matters worse, giving her obvious sore tummies, and making her pass painful wind. I'm glad I tried it, but it really was no right for my daughter.