"One patient had a master's degree in biology and she told me, `It's wonderful, whenever they give the gripe-water, the baby sleeps,'" Uy recalled. "Turns out, it contains 8 percent alcohol."
In the 1980s and early 1990s, such concerns prompted the Food and Drug Administration to order customs agents to seize cases of the stuff at the border. Now nonalcoholic gripe waters have their own followings. Rakowski-Gallagher is a second-generation convert -- and an example of how old remedies recycle through
migration.
Perhaps the only retired New York City police officer who owns a breastfeeding boutique, she was born in Berlin 40 years ago. Though her own colic was dosed with British gripe water, as her mother tells it, she was resolved to give her babies nothing but breast milk for the first six months.
Then her second, Jack, wailed for three or four weeks, and her mother screamed, "`Give your son some gripe water or I'll kill you now!'"
"I did use half a dose on my son and half a dose on me," Rakowski-Gallagher recalled, "and there was a miracle."
According to a 2001 research review by American Family Physician, such colic miracles are clinically unproven, or owe a lot to placebo effect on parents. But to parents, placebo is not a dirty word. And one study did find improvement from an herbal tea of chamomile, vervain, licorice, fennel and balm-mint -- herbs championed by various immigrant groups.
At a time when mainstream medicine is marketing non-Western techniques from yoga to acupuncture, native parents seem more open to trying "natural" methods -- or to buying trademarked approximations: a "Miracle Blanket" for swaddling, a "Lull-a-Band" inspired by a Guatemalan grandmother, a teddy bear that makes womb noises.
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