Whenever the seasons change, the weather is hot and cold, and the child is prone to colds, coughs and other symptoms, but because most of the situations are some daily small diseases, many parents will buy medicines for their children to alleviate.
When buying medicines, parents should pay attention to the fact that many common cough medicines are actually unreliable.
Cough medicines containing codeine ingredients
At the beginning of 2017, the State Food and Drug Administration issued a document ordering pharmaceutical companies to revise drug instructions containing codeine ingredients.
One of the most critical ones is that children under 12 years of age are contraindicated; if children aged 12 to 18 years with chronic respiratory diseases, and adolescents should not use this drug.
Codeine is an opioid. Under normal circumstances, the proper use of codeine in medicine can play analgesic and cough relief.
But if you take a large amount of it, it will produce pleasure and hallucinations, and long-term overdose will be addictive and bring great disasters to individuals and families.
At the same time, improper use may also lead to some adverse reactions, such as extreme drowsiness, confusion, respiratory depression, and may even endanger life safety.
It has also been reported many times in the society that some people and even students will use codeine-containing cough water as a "new drug" to consume, which eventually leads to debt, and even embarks on the road of crime, ruining a lifetime.
In 2012, People's Daily published an article expressing concern about indiscriminate use of codeine components to suppress cough water, which mentioned a real thing that happened.
A young man in Guangdong began to abuse codeine-containing cough water from the age of 12, ranging from 7-8 bottles to 20 bottles per day. After eight years of drinking, his height shrank from the highest 1.72 meters to 1.60 meters, a full 12 centimeters less, and he also paid a huge financial and health price.
Codeine, like morphine, is extracted from poppy husks and is addictive.
At the same time, in addition to the drugs that clearly label the codeine ingredients in the instructions, some drugs that are also marked with poppy husks, compound camphor tinctures and other ingredients are also addictive.
There are many types of cough medicines containing similar codeine ingredients, which can be referred to the following figure to help parents identify.
In addition to domestic drugs, Haitao's drugs also need the attention of parents, just like Anpanman, who was very popular for a while before, also contained codeine ingredients.
Cough medicine containing promethazine
Promethazine is a Western medicine ingredient that has relatively large side effects and may cause respiratory depression or even death in children under 2 years of age.
Therefore, the World Health Organization has issued a warning: promethazine (fina root) is contraindicated in children under 2 years of age, and its use as an antitussive is prohibited.
However, promethazine is often mixed in traditional Chinese medicine cough medicines, the most common including:
Cold cough syrup
Compound platycodon loquat syrup
In addition to cough medicine, there are still many drugs that contain this ingredient, so parents must pay more attention to the ingredient list when choosing drugs.
Seeing this, many parents have to ask, what cough medicine is both reliable and safe, suitable for children to eat?
The answer is that cough medicine can not be eaten without eating!
For children under 6 years of age, doctors do not recommend using any over-the-counter cough medication to relieve cough. In addition, children under 12 years of age also need to avoid cough medicine as much as possible.
Because cough is not a disease, but a symptom, a self-protective response of the human body, that is to say, coughing is not a bad thing.
It is only by coughing that children can excrete discomfort in the trachea, such as foreign bodies, bacterial viruses, or sputum.
In this case, giving the child medicine to suppress cough only solves the superficial problem, but does not solve the actual problem.
So how should parents deal with their children's coughs?
1. Find the causes of cough in children through retrospectives, including environmental factors, diet and climate change.
2. Consider using honey for cough relief, but it is not recommended for children under 1 year old to prevent infection caused by harmful bacteria that may be contained in honey. Children over 1 year old can take 2 to 5 ml of honey orally to relieve cough, but should not be used frequently.
Infants under 3.6 months of age can eat more breast milk and relieve cough by increasing fluid intake to dilute sputum.
Children over 4.6 months old can drink more warm boiled water appropriately, which can also play a role in cough relief.
5. The air can be humidified using a humidifier, and the suitable humidity range is about 55%.
If the child's cough lasts for more than 2 weeks, which seriously affects normal diet and sleep, or is accompanied by other obvious symptoms of discomfort, then parents should take the child to seek medical treatment in time.
To sum up, parents should treat children's cough rationally, do not be too anxious, and do not need to blindly use medicine to suppress cough, cough is really not so terrible.