Screaming & refusing breastfeeds

Hi all,
I just need a bit of a shoulder to cry on here.
My gorgeous girl is 4 months old and ever since she was 11 weeks old she has screamed and arched her back at breast feeds. I have tried everything and am getting so upset about it, I have to trick her into feeding when she is half asleep and consequently she isn't gaining weight as quickly as I think she should be - she was 5.3 kilos on 13/07 and 5.86 on 16/08 - that is just over 100gms per week and I am not sure if that is enough. She also is very spilly still and I think that just about everything she is getting is coming back up.
She is a really happy girl though and the spilling doesn't even worry her - she just smiles and keeps on spilling!! So given the fact that she is so happy and chatty and in general looking really good - should I be worrying??

Any suggestions or comments would be really great and if anyone else is going through this as well I would love to hear about it

Thanks, Jo

Sounds like my baby - it was reflux for us. It's horrible feeding them like that. Try feeding her more upright? Talk to the doctor or LLL about it too. Gotta go to work now, but have a look through the reflux threads.

Thanks everyone, we were told that she had reflux early on and then we saw a lactation consultant who said that she was convinced she didn't have reflux, she was just hungry and a spilly baby.

I have just had the karitane nurse from plunket ring and talk to me like I was a naughty school kid (I'm 40 and have been a parent for 22 years!!) she said I have absolutely nothing to worry about, and she is going to come and watch bubs feeding next week - likely chance that will be - bubs only feeds from me at night (daddy joked is she going to visit us in the middle of the night!),

Oh well I guess I will just have to keep going with expressing milk and bottle feeding it to her along with a bit of baby rice which seems to help her keep things down a bit better. I will check out the crying over spilt milk website and see if I can get any ideas from that. We have done the whole losec/gaviscon/ruhgar thing and it didn't really help her which makes me think that it's not reflux, but maybe it is just a different type or something.

Thanks again,
Jo x

Have you looked into taking her to a good osteopath? Cranio-sacral osteopathy is a great alternative therapy for fixing underlying / hidden 'problems' - and there are plenty of practitioners out there that have experience with babies. I'm not saying it will fix things, but at least it would mean you could rule out that anything was out of alignment with her bones / muscles etc.