At 09:14 PM 8/6/98 EDT, you wrote:
>Pat,
>I thought gentian violet was dangerous, a potential poison and NOT to be
>swallowed!

It is certainly my position that gentian violet is not poisonous.  It has
been used for years for oral thrush, and given the practitioners who still
recommend it strengthens my position.

I believe that the hazards of gentian violet is a great sell job by the
makers of other, less effective, and more expensive antifungal drugs.  We,
of course, need to use it wisely, and there is good advice for how to do
this.

I have been using gentian violet with much success for close to 2 years.
Sometimes a mother doesn't want to use it because of the staining, but
usually after weeks of unsuccessful treatment with other antifungals and
continued pain, she comes to believe that a few days of purple is a small
price to pay for painless feeding.

I just called the mother whom I wrote about in my original post yesterday
and her nipples are pain free, and she can see the cracks beginning to fill
in with healthy tissue.  Another mother said that within 2 hours of
applying G/V to her nipples she could feed her baby without cringing.

As for the ulcers in baby's mouth, I had a case last month in which a baby
had ulcers in her mouth along with a very bad case of thrush.  This baby
was using Nystatin, not G/V. Also my own mother, who is diabetic, gets
ulcers on the roof of her mouth and in her throat when she has a serious
case of thrush.

Patricia Gima, IBCLC
Milwaukee


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