You've tried the drops. Here's what else is worth doing

You've already got the drops. They're on the counter, half used, not doing much. Every South Asian household has three or four fixes for a windy baby that came from someone's mother rather than a pharmacy shelf, and none of them are anti colic drops.

Some of those fixes hold up, some don't, and one of them can actually hurt your baby if you're not careful with it. Here's the honest rundown, bottle-free.

What actually works when the bottle doesn't?

Movement and position do more, more reliably, than anything you swallow or squeeze from a dropper. Bicycling the legs, changing how you hold the baby, and a few minutes on their tummy move trapped air in a way a dropper can't reach.

None of it is dramatic. It's five minutes, repeated, not a single trick that fixes the evening. We built our own Gas Relief routine around exactly that — small, repeatable, done before things get hard rather than in the middle of it.

It's also what jaapa support already looks like in most South Asian homes — someone experienced, on hand, cycling through the same three or four moves without a receipt for any of them.

Does bicycling their legs actually help?

Yes, more consistently than most single remedies. Lay your baby on their back, hold both ankles, and pedal their knees toward their chest and back, alternating legs, for a minute or two at a time.

"We did 'bicycle legs' for gas and that often worked great," one mother wrote on The Bump forums in January 2011, describing what settled her son when nothing else did. It's the move every grandmother reaches for without ever calling it an exercise.

It won't work every single time, and nobody's evening improves by expecting it to. It's the first thing we'd try, not the only thing.

What's the colic hold, and does changing position help?

Sometimes the fastest fix is getting the air moving downward instead of trying to rub it out. Lay your baby face-down along your forearm, their head at your elbow, a hand supporting their chest, and let gravity and gentle pressure do what your hands were doing less efficiently.

Some call it the colic hold, some the tiger-in-the-tree hold — it's the same over-the-arm carry an auntie will do without ever needing a name for it. Pair it with an unhurried walk around the room and you've got the whole move.

It's the first thing we reach for before anything else on this list, because it costs nothing to try and works in under a minute if it's going to work at all.

Do probiotics help with colic?

For breastfed babies, the best evidence says yes, modestly. Sung et al., writing in Pediatrics in 2018, reviewed the trials of the probiotic strain Lactobacillus reuteri DSM17938 and found it reduced crying and fussing time in breastfed infants with colic.

The same review found no such benefit in formula-fed babies — the effect tracked feeding type, not the baby. That's a real, if narrow, win, and it's worth naming plainly rather than rounding it up to "probiotics work."

We don't sell a probiotic and have no stake in that answer either way — we just think you should know which strain the evidence is actually about before you buy one.

What about gripe water and gas drops?

Weaker than the shelf space suggests. Metcalf and colleagues ran a placebo-controlled trial of simethicone — the active ingredient behind most gas drops — in Pediatrics back in 1994, and babies on the real drops did no better than babies on the placebo.

Gripe water's evidence is thinner still, and older formulations included alcohol and sugar that have no business near a newborn. If the drops are working for your family, that's not nothing — just don't mistake it for a trial anyone has actually won.

We'd rather point you at the moves above first and let the dropper be a backup, not the plan.

The paste in a nani's kitchen, and why we don't recommend it

A baby's skin is thinner than a stovetop paste was ever designed for. If your family swears by heeng, dilute it heavily, patch-test it away from the tummy first, and watch for redness rather than assuming none is coming.

Where does massage fit in?

It's real, it's gentle, and it isn't a cure — we're not going to oversell our own routine to make this post tidier. Our honest look at infant massage for colic covers what the trials actually show, and our full colic massage sequence walks the seven steps in order.

What it gives you that a dropper can't is ten predictable minutes with your hands on your baby, which is worth something on a bad evening even before any wind moves.

When is it something else?

Ordinary gas and fussiness peak in the evening and pass within an hour or two, whatever you try. A baby who won't feed, is vomiting forcefully, has blood in a nappy, or has a fever needs a call to your paediatrician, not another technique from this list.

Our safety guide lays out the full set of days to skip massage entirely — worth reading once, before you need it, not mid-crisis.

What to take from this

Movement and position beat the dropper, one probiotic strain has real evidence behind it for breastfed babies, and the home remedy in your nani's kitchen deserves respect and caution in equal measure. None of it is new — it's what households have done between feeds for generations, just sorted, finally, by what actually holds up.

The Gas Relief routine puts the best-evidenced moves in order, guided, if you'd rather follow along than remember the list at eleven at night.