While staring at your newborn, looking at his face you often wonder who does he look like? What if all you see is a yellowish face and pale lips. This can surely disturb you as this is jaundice what your child is having. It is completely normal for newborns to suffer from jaundice and can be treated at home easily. And no it isn’t related to cord clamping at all.
The best child specialist in Karachi says that jaundice occurs because of excessive production of bilirubin in the blood of the baby. Because of it, the eyes start to appear yellow and the face goes pale. The most common symptoms when jaundice prolongs for more than 7 days include:
- Faint stool and dark urine
- Difficulty in feeding
- Lethargy with crying more than usual
- Weight loss
If not treated and managed in time, this gets difficult to be handle. For that, you need to focus on these remedies in order to make it easy for the child to deal with the disease.
Frequent Feeding
It has been seen that the children that have jaundice sleep more than usual or compared to the infants of their age. But mothers do have to put a lot of effort in order to feed the baby. Mothers should wake their babies up from sleep in order to feed them in equal gaps of time.
The reason behind frequent feeding is that the milk helps a lot in expelling the bilirubin from the blood through stool and urine. It is essential for new mothers to opt for a diet that is highly nutritious in order to feed the newborn with nourishing milk. Try and consume nuts, seafood, greens, and a fiber-rich diet to help yourself produce. Another important thing that every mother needs to do is skin-to-skin contact with the child. In this way, you can make the baby habitual of feeding early on. This helps eventually a lot in lowering down the bilirubin levels.
Sun Bathing
It is very helpful if you keep your baby under direct sunlight for about 1 hour every day when he’s suffering from jaundice. This aids in the treatment in a way because of the blue light spectrum in sunlight. This natural spectrum can help break down bilirubin and eliminate it from the body. Be careful when you bathe the baby in the sun, there are high chances of him getting sunburned.
In some severe cases, or where the baby’s skin is sensitive phototherapy is used which is designed in a way that works exactly how sunlight works for the body.
Supplements
Babies who suffer from jaundice should be taking more milk than those who don’t suffer from this disease. Formula milk is a very good substitute for breast milk if it isn’t enough for your little champ.
Another thing to keep in mind is to feed an adequate amount of milk to the baby. Excess feeding can also cause dehydration and can stop the bowel movement completely, which results in zero elimination of bilirubin from the body. Some studies say that breast milk does contain some chemicals that can be blamed as a cause of jaundice. But should be kept in mind that mothers don’t really have to stop feeding as this condition gets better in weeks if it doesn’t get worse.
Flour of Barely Seed
This therapy is done a lot in Iranian culture. This is odd in a manner that it requires rubbing barely seed flour on the body of the baby while exposing him to light. This is said to work in a way where the indirect bilirubin levels are deceased that are functioning as major antioxidants in the body.
Transfusion
Not in all, but in severe cases of jaundice the baby might need an exchange blood transfusion when all other treatments don’t show any response. In this method, withdrawal of blood repeatedly is performed and is replaced by the donor’s blood. This results in thinning of the bilirubin leading to its eventual excretion.
Final Thought
Jaundice in newborns or infants is not something to take lightly. Do notice the sign and symptoms mentioned above and try to manage them with the home remedies explained above. If all of this doesn’t help or make the baby feel better, it’s important to visit a child specialist as soon as you can.
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