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We weren't on Prilosec, but they did both take Prevacid, which I think works in a similar way, as opposed to Zantac. I can't remember the dose of the Prevacid (and I think it might be based on weight or age anyway), but it was a God send!

We started both boys on Zantac around 5 or 6 weeks. They slowly increased the dose because he didn't want to give them anything else until they were a little bit older. The Zantac may have helped a little bit, but we never saw any major improvement. I think they were around 3 months when he switched them to Prevacid. I will just say as a cautionary tale that the first 7 or 8 days were pretty awful in the transition from Zantac to Prevacid for one of my guys, but he also had pretty raging acid reflux. I read a few things on a BabyCenter group about reflux that switching to a PPI can sometimes cause an "acid battle"--i.e., the stomach works fights the meds and produces more acid, until finally the meds win. I'm sure this doesn't happen all the time, but I just wanted to mention it because I was not expecting it and if I hadn't been warned that it can take up to two weeks to be fully effective, I probably would have insisted that he be taken off that med. Around day 7, it clicked and it was like I had a whole new baby! I am sooooo thankful we got on something stronger than Zantac! I wrote a post about our acid reflux issue for the blog, and I discussed the switch from Zantac to Prevacid. I'll go find the link.

Your pedi may already have LO on the highest dose of Zantac that can be given for that weight, so that may be why they want to switch to Prilosec instead of increasing a dose of Zantac.

http://www.hellobee.com/2013/09/03/surviving-reflux-colds-angle-sleeping-and-crib-nests/

Here's a post on how I made crib "nests" to sleep at an angle.

And here is the one that actually describes our experience and talks about what I had generally learned about the different meds and how PPIs (proton pump inhibitors like Prilosec and Prevacid) work.

http://www.hellobee.com/2013/07/03/surviving-reflux-symptoms-diagnosis/

Like, @MrsF: & @NavyRN2012: said, we were able to take them off the meds later without any problems at all. I think it was around 7 months that they stopped taking the Prevacid and they had no problems at all at that point.

Zantac did nothing for us, we did Prilosec and it did nothing, so we were switched to Prevacid and that helped (we are actually abck on it again at 21 months.)

they do it because it's a different formula and works differently than zantac. Higher dose doesn't mean it will be more affective for such a small child.

Zantac didn't work for us so we switched to Prilosec maybe at 4 months? It worked really well.