Opinion: Keeping, or tossing, the kids’ meds

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This much is already known: Over-the-counter cough and cold medicines don’t work for young children. Or, rather, they do work. They just don’t work better than a placebo, which actually works pretty well with children a lot of the time.

But if a medicine can’t do more than a placebo, why continue to give the medicine, which can have side effects, aside from that OTC pediatric meds are a big money-maker? (Speaking of which, one woman actually developed a placebo for kids. They make the chewable flavored pills to seem like candy, and she makes a chewable flavored pill to seem like medicine.) When parents don’t see the medIcine working, they tend to think they didn’t give enough and overdose the child; toddlers 2 and under have been espeCially likely to end up in emergency rooms over this sort of thing.

Seeing which way things were going, the manufacturers voluntarily yanked their infant formulations, but an FDA medical panel wants to take it further. Saying the meds clearly don’t work for kids younger than 6, they want those off the market, too. The FDA is holding a hearing this week, trying to figure out which way to go on this.

The medicines were approved years ago, under much weaker standards. The question the FDA has to ask itself is, now that they’re here, and a billion-dollar industry to boot, should they be thrown out?