For City Kept Sleepless by Colic,

No End to Cures in Melting Pot

Nearly 200 languages are spoken in New York City, and in all of them, the wail of a colicky baby needs no translation. Nursed, burped, rocked, changed and cuddled, the baby still howls.

Ruth Fremson/ The New York Times
Leonel Hernandez gets tea to prevent
crying; it doesn't always work.

Is it indigestion? Gas? Nostalgia for the womb? Nobody really knows. So in this city where 6 of 10 babies have at least one foreign-born parent and pediatricians come from every corner of the world, a cornucopia of colic cures serves as a kind of Rorschach test of child-rearing culture in migration.

Doctors cheerfully define colic as more than three hours of "unexplained crying" three times a week in an otherwise healthy infant. It affects anywhere from 10 percent to half of all babies in the first three months, and leaves glassy-eyed parents ready to try almost anything.

"You would boil pork rinds if someone told you it worked," said Felina Rakowski-Gallagher, a mother of two whose Manhattan boutique, the Upper Breast Side, caters to nursing mothers and serves as a hot spot for rumors of remedies at the front lines of baby care.

So far, no one is touting pork rinds as a cure for colic. But little New Yorkers are being comforted with Colombian cinnamon tea, soothed with Egyptian recipes for rosewater and calmed with infusions of anise seed, fennel, chamomile, or "hierba buena," a kind of spearmint plant that Latin American mothers and baby sitters seek out in supermarkets. Others are dosed with "gripe water," the elixir once bootlegged from the former British Empire, and now sold over the Internet in nonalcoholic versions with names like "Colic-Ease" and "Baby's Bliss."

Sure, methods from the heyday of America's machine age are still popular: place the crying baby atop a vibrating washing machine; run the vacuum cleaner full blast near the cradle, or take the wakeful infant on a midnight ride (preferably on a route without stoplights).

But now, with more immigrants in the city than ever before, so too are there more ancient anticolic traditions practiced down the block: Chinese acupressure, Haitian belly binding, Mexican swaddling, Indian oil massage, African cowry shell bracelets. And just as exotic foods from distant cultures enter the city's culinary mainstream, these methods are being examined and tried by the city's natives and nonimmigrant transplants, desperate for any way to stop the screaming.

At St. John's Family Health Center in the Elmhurst area of Queens, Dr. Lolita Uy has seen almost every colic remedy known to woman. Her basic rule: "Anything outside the baby is fine. Anything internal, I have to know."

Dr. Uy, who grew up in the Phillipines speaking Chinese and Spanish, tends toward tolerance for such old herbal remedies as the chamomile tea that Leonel Hernandez, a 2-month-old of Mexican, German, Scottish and Puerto Rican descent, gets twice a day.

"It's supposed to clear out your system of gas or constipation," said his mother, Krystina Hernandez, 18, who was using a constant hip-sway, football carry and back-rubbing technique to keep Leonel's fussing at a low simmer. "His Mexican grandmother told me about it."

But Dr. Uy takes a dim view of the old version of gripe water, though it typically contained safe spices and herbs like fennel, ginger, dill, or anise, and is particularly championed by mothers and baby nurses from places once under the influence of British nannies - the West Indies, India, Egypt and Canada

"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,'" Dr. Uy recalled. "Turns out, it contains 8 percent alcohol."

In the 1980's and early 1990's, 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. Ms. 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 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," Ms. 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.

"We're talking about a population that isn't used to popping pills to deal with pain," said Juanita Lara, health access coordinator for the Latin American Integration Center. "They're used to drinking teas and rubbing oils. It's going to comfort them because of the warmth, because of the flavor."

For Maggie Wong, director of marketing at the Charles B. Wang Community Health Center in Chinatown and a first-time mother at 40, comfort came from doing acupressure massage of her baby's palm, as taught by an acupuncturist friend, or chanting the names of Buddha.

"It helps to calm me down also," Ms. Wong said.

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.

Others have married into the real thing, like Gabriele Ortiz, 40, who described herself as "half-Jewish, half-Italian, like a good New Yorker," and said it was her Mexican husband who taught her to swaddle their baby, Madeleine, and calm her with a nightly bath.

Even for hybrid New Yorkers, some remedies seem just too exotic. One Brazilian immigrant mother whose firstborn cried until 3 a.m. for the first three months was urged by her Trinidadian housecleaner to settle his digestion with a surefire home remedy: a tea made from cayenne pepper. She demurred.

"I was desperate, but not that desperate," said the mother, Danielle Curi, 36. Native or immigrant, there may be no substitute for experience, said Dr. Sandy Saintonge, a pediatrician at New York Hospital Queens, whose family is from Haiti. She has counseled patients from every continent on colic, in the process collecting an international repertory of home remedies.

Then, 18 months ago, she had her own child.

"I wasn't prepared for the crying," she confessed. Eventually, she called her older sister, a nurse and experienced mother, who gave her the best advice: "Just ride it through. It will not last forever."

So the doctor put on her music headphones, held her baby close, and danced through the tears.