Billions of doses of children's cold medicine, and FDA now says it's crap.

[Zuiderelle]

Wonderful. Besides all the money spent and time delayed in parents not bringing their children to the doctor to actually get REAL medicine, what the hell have we been giving them?

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21376717/

FDA panel: Don’t use cold meds in kids under 6
Experts also conclude over-the-counter drugs don't help older kids either

WASHINGTON - Cold and cough medicines don’t work in children and shouldn’t be used in those younger than 6, federal health advisers recommended Friday.

The over-the-counter medicines should be studied further, even after decades in which children have received billions of doses a year, the outside experts told the Food and Drug Administration. The FDA isn’t required to follow the advice of its panels of outside experts but does so most of the time.

“The data that we have now is they don’t seem to work,” said Sean Hennessy, a University of Pennsylvania epidemiologist, one of the FDA experts gathered to examine the medicines sold to treat common cold symptoms. The recommendation applies to medicines containing one or more of the following ingredients: decongestants, expectorants, antihistamines and antitussives.

I'm fuming. We've been giving our kid cough medicine all week. No wonder he's not feeling any better.

[Clark2008]

1. Seems to work on my son - always has.

I'm not sure I understand the claims.

:shrug:

All cold medicine is supposed to do is treat the symptoms so they can rest. The only thing that gets rid of colds is time.

[Zuiderelle]

2. I wonder if they have actually found some adverse effects, otherwise,

why the need to make this public claim now, and without specifics?

I have also found that expectorants work, or seem to, and antihistamines as well.

[SoCalDem]

8. The problem seems to be the inaccurate dosing of the kids..

parents who don't measure correctly, or doses that are too strong for the weight limit indicated..or parents who apparently cannot tell time, and then over medicate their kids.

and since fevers are a symptom, not an illness, they may not take the kid to the doctor, and the illness progresses untreated..

There are some pretty severe illnesses that "look like" a cold, but can kill a small child if not treated..

[Warpy]

3. If you treat a cold aggressively, it'll be gone in a week.

Otherwise, it'll hang on for seven days.

Some of the OTC stuff can alleviate symptoms. Other stuff has a sedative effect and allows the sick kid and the parents to get a little sleep.

Any kid who starts having trouble breathing, refuses to swallow and is unable to handle his secretions, or spikes a sudden, high fever late in the cold needs to see a doc right away, not tomorrow, even if it means a visit to the ER.

[GreenPartyVoter]

11. They worked wonders for mine too.

[Manifestor_of_Light]

4. Benadryl doesn't put me to sleep either, and I'm an adult.

They said it doesn't put children to sleep either.

[Horse with no Name]

9. Benadryl most always puts kids to sleep

BUT there have been many cases of paradoxical excitation caused by Benadryl.
In other words...it does exactly the opposite.

[SoCalDem]

5. Guess what? It's ALWAYS been pretty much crap.

Luke warm baths lower fevers faster and safer and a fever is a SYMPTOM of an illness that needs to be diagnosed by a doctor.

Our pediatrician was also our next door neighbor, and we had a son who would spike a high fever in an instant, so John hopped the fence many times to check him out when he was small.. It was usually an ear infection that required REAL meds..not an over the counter fever reducer..

Colds last about the same amount of time..meds or no meds..

We used steam to unclog them, chicken soup (which they loved) and lots of iced & hot teas with lemon..

I am not anti-medicine..it just never seemed to work all that well..

[woodsprite]

6. My ped had my son taking Robitussin DM when he had

pneumonia when he was 5 and it worked like a charm. We didn't do it during the day, but at night he definitely needed something to help him get some rest. Yes, even with the steam vaporizer on. I personally thinking they're doing this not to benefit the kids as much as it is to make sure big pharma gets their cut. They can charge a whole lot more if all the meds have to be prescription rather than over the counter. It works out well, except for the patient, because the docs get paid for the visits that are required to issue a script too.

[Horse with no Name]

7. I worked for a pediatrician in the early 90's that knew this

and refused to recommend it and told the parents not to give it to the kids.
In fact, she went through our sample closet and tossed all the samples.
The REAL questions should be
1. How long has the FDA known this
2. How long have the pharmaceutical companies known this

I guarantee if we had honest answers to either/both of these questions, people would be pissed.

[durrrty libby]

10. I never gave any of that crap to my boys. Never believed in it

[Igel]

12. Eh.

The Hennessy quote's possible, but he may have been misquoted or speaking hastily, if a later section is correct:

"For the most part, the results from tests in adults have been extrapolated to determine whether the medicines work in children. But even that evidence is “modest at best,” said panel chairwoman Dr. Mary Tinetti of Yale University School of Medicine. Indeed, all but one of the 22 panelists then voted to say that extrapolation is unacceptable."

This doesn't mean that there's evidence they don't work, really. It's saying there's not good evidence they do work. The default hypothesis is that if it's not shown to work it doesn't is all well and good, but defaults aren't evidence.

Note that there are OTC drugs *not* on the list: E.g., acetominophen, which we've used as an antipyretic. Personally, we *think* that the Benadryl we've given our kid's helped his runny nose, but we can't distinguish between placebo and actual effects (we know that it's worked with rashes, so it has some antihistamine effect--no placebo affect possible, the kid had no idea why he was being asked to take Benadryl). The solution for a runny nose at bedtime is, in my opinion, simply making sure he sleeps with his nose pointed up. But that's another matter.

However, we got some stuff in Lodz that worked. OTC, to the extent you can call any drug in Poland "OTC". We put the stuff in our toddler's nose, and he stopped sniffling. Ok, he started screaming furiously because we used too much so it dribbled into his throat and irritated it, but he stopped crying, wasn't sniffling, and went right to sleep. 6 hours later, the sniffles returned, and we got the dosing slightly under control. Bliss, even when he was awake. (We had similar stuff for our grown-up noses and wish we could get more in the US ... although it probably would cause liver failure or something.)