Your kid has a cold -- what now?
Empowered Patient, a regular feature from CNN Medical News correspondent Elizabeth Cohen, helps put you in the driver's seat when it comes to health care. On the popular parenting Web site urbanbaby.com, a writer asks whether it's OK to give an 18-month-old "a tiny bit of Robitussin" for her "cold/cough and fever." "No flames please," the parent requests. But flames she got. "Idiot," one user writes. "The answer is of course not," another writes. "Come on ... these cough syrups are totally ineffective in ameliorating the common cold and are harmful to your child." Over-the-counter cough and cold medications for a child under 6 goes against the advice of the Food and Drug Administration -- and apparently that of many fellow parents on the Internet. These medications have been blamed for more than 100 deaths and at least thousands of trips to the emergency room. But what else can a parent do? "I use these types of meds at night so we can all get some sleep," writes another parent on urbanbaby.com. "It's the only thing that helps with her cough at night," another says. Or as one parent puts it succinctly on the Craigslist parenting forum: "It sucks not knowing what to do." Here are a few alternatives that physicians give their patients when little ones are miserable with a cough or cold. it could make them sick). She also tells patients a warm bath with eucalyptus oil helps open stuffed-up nasal passages. Bailey says menthol in the bath works, too. startclickprintexclude--> She also recommends a vapor rub for stuffy noses -- except for infants under 1 month. (She says applying it under the nose can cause apnea in such infants.) These suggestions, the doctors say, are in addition to the basics that any pediatrician would recommend: warm liquids, a humidifier, a saline nose spray and a nasal bulb syringe to suck out what's stuffing up your little one. But even with all these tricks, there's nothing that will magically make your child's cough or cold go away -- or magically get them to sleep. |
