When Georgia gets very sick she drags around, snarfy nose dripping, eyes watering. She carries a silk “handkersniff” because tissues are “too cruel” to her nose, but most often she wipes her nose on her sleeve. She sometimes has bursts of energy, followed by a crash that needs quick comfort. Sick little kids are sad, pitiful beings, who sleep fitfully and spread their germs all over everything—and you—while you’re trying to comfort and entertain them and get some liquids and nutrients into them.
No wonder we parents look to drugs to bring them, and us, relief. When Georgia had her first really sneezy, red, stuffed-up nose she was old enough to use cold medicine, and though I was hesitant, I felt I needed to do something more than the dreaded Nose Sucker (aka suction bulb) and saline drops. I’m not a big fan of cold medicine for myself—I fear those cocktail combination remedies and don’t like to feel groggy—so I usually just use aspirin and maybe a nasal decongestant if sleep is impossible. But recently, I felt so sad about Georgia’s discomfort that I went to the medicine-for-minors section in the grocery store and was instantly overwhelmed. There was Cough/Cold/Flu, Allergy/Cold, Flu/Cough, Cold/Cough, a dizzying display of varying mixtures, and nothing I felt so comfortable with.
I cautiously tried the medicine I thought would be the most useful. She fought and gagged on saline drops so much I thought I was drowning her. We tried an oral decongestant, which hyped her up to the point of toddler insanity for hours past her bedtime, and didn’t offer much relief. Then we tried antihistamine, which warned that it might put her to sleep but which also hyped her up and didn’t offer much relief. Thinking back to my childhood and my mom’s cold care routine, I rubbed some natural menthol balm on Georgia’s chest and back, put on the humidifier and tried to keep her on her back so the snot could drain from her nose.
It worked as well as anything, and it became my default remedy too. (Thanks, Mom. I’ll forgo giving her warm Jell-O to drink though…) But I couldn’t leave it alone, so I dallied with decongestant nose drops, which seemed to help Georgia get to sleep, but she begged, “No, Mommy, pleeeease, pleeeease, not the nose drops! I HATE them.” I couldn’t bully her to let me use them, so I stopped. And now with an FDA advisory panel recommending against using children’s cold medicines [1], I’m angry that I even looked at all that medication in the first place. Finding out that there’s “no evidence of efficacy of the drugs and there’s evidence of harm of the drugs” I find myself once again looking at a billion dollar industry that only seems to have my wallet, and not my best interest, in mind. Even without being bombarded by TV ads that promote better living through chemistry (since we only watch DVDs and videos), I fell for one of the oldest snake-oil jobs out there. A cold is a miserable thing, and we don’t like to see our kids to suffer. But as Hova’s Grandma Georgia used to say, “A cold will get better in seven days if you take medicine and a week if you don’t.”
I checked with Dr. Weil and found some good recommendations for alternatives to cold medicine [2], but it seems we’d all be better off to just drip, snarf, honk and whine until our colds go away, while making sure to take precautions [2] so as not to get sick in the first place!