There’s a saying in medicine: “The more drugs you have for an illness, the more useless they are.” Cough medicines, vitamins and frequently, antibiotics, fall into this category.
Apart from the paving of streets before an election and the sudden reappearance of lost politicians walking around the Savannah, you know a country is Third World when there is public demand for cough medicines and vitamins, two of the more useless drugs available in pharmacies.
If I had a dollar for every time a mother or father asked me to recommend a cough medicine or vitamin, I would be a millionaire.
The only cough medicine I ever recommended regularly in my first 25 years of medical practice, the ending years of the 20th century, was the one thought to be so good that it went to the moon with the astronauts on Apollo missions 7 and 12. It was later removed from the market because of its associations with stroke in middle-aged women with high blood pressure. No one knows what, if anything, it will do to children who took it in those years as they grow up.
How many times have we heard that some medication, after being used for years, is found to have undesirable properties and should not be taken any more? Yet, in happy T&T, it seems that if parents go to see the doctor and go away without some prescription or medicine in their hand, they somehow feel cheated. It is a sort of a “10 days work” syndrome. Everyone feels entitled to a 10 days prescription.
Antibiotics are powerful drugs. They are used widely for coughs and colds but are ineffective. They have serious side effects. Early antibiotic exposure, particularly during the first year of life, disrupts developing gut bacteria. This disruption is heavily linked to an increased risk of developing childhood immune-mediated conditions, such as asthma, eczema, allergies and metabolic disorders like obesity later in life
Cough mixtures neither relieve nor stop cough. They also don’t soothe the throat. Honey and lime and steam do that much better and are cheaper.
The only thing cough medicines may do is to make some children sleep at night. Sometimes this is helpful. It enables the child (and family) to rest. Rest is important in the healing process. But drugging the child to sleep can have unpleasant consequences.
First, the medication interferes with the child’s developing brain. That’s not something you want to do. Second, if the child is drugged up with the sleeping medication the cough mixture contains and needs to cough up mucus, she may be unable to do this and vomit onto the bed or worse, into her lungs.
Vitamins are another useless medicine. People think vitamins are miracle drugs. Take them and you get better right away. Eat poorly but take vitamins! The TV advertisements say so and everyone knows the TV ads are “always correct!”
Children should be taught in school not to believe advertisements. You can’t depend on parents to teach this because we were brought up to believe anything we saw on TV. We are now adapting this to social media with AI coming for us! Vitamins are said to give you energy. They are misnamed “tonics.”
Nobody knows what they tone up but the expression has subtle tones of sexual prowess. Some of the names suggest they give you “stamina.”
In children, they are supposed to tone up their brains around exam time. They are also considered “appetite openers” and are commonly used by many parents who, because of work, cannot cook nourishing home meals and may feel guilty. So, they take the advice of the company that makes the vitamin and try to shove it down their child’s throat. Or “a vitamin a day keeps the doctor away.
Vitamins were first found to be necessary in minuscule amounts to prevent disease, not to improve health. But if you need a vitamin, you are sick. If a child needs a vitamin, you are not feeding that child well. The solution is to feed the child well.
Vitamins are not innocuous. They are drugs. Some vitamins are really hormones. Both vitamin A and vitamin D are now thought to be hormones. People who would never consider giving their child a hormone merrily give them vitamins. Children can become ill if they take too much of a vitamin and some have died because of an overdose.
Fortunately, even in T&T, there seems to a greater understanding of the dangers of medications for children. This can only result in better child health and, eventually, better adult health.
