Life
As Mary Poppins claimed, a "spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down." But when your baby is sick and needs meds in real life, it's perfectly valid to wonder, is flavoring baby medicine OK? When it's 3 a.m. and you haven't gotten any sleep because of a sick baby, you're likely to do anything to get your little one to take his or her medicine and settle down. But is adding a "spoonful of sugar" really the best move? A study conducted by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development looked at this very issue. While the results of this study suggested that flavoring medicine does not impact the effectiveness of medicine, the study also concluded that adding flavor didn't completely mask the bitterness of all meds, especially strong drugs. Additionally, the doctors concluded that adding sugar or sugar substitutes to baby medication might make your kid a sugar addict (or at least crave sugar) when many parents try to limit sugar intake in young children with developing taste buds.
Babies are intuitive, so even before your kid hits the toddler stage he or she might fight you on taking medicine. Why? Well, you know that babies, even at a young age, seem to have their own agenda. And according to Woman's Day, infants are born with taste buds that innately favor sweet and reject bitter tastes. So, even an infant is likely to spit up medicine because his or her taste buds are "rejecting" it. And as the former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop said, "drugs don’t work in patients who don’t take them." The World Health Organization cited this famous quote in a study that looked at the relationship between health professionals, the pharmaceutical industry, and patients. Still, when you've got a sick baby and you're pulling your hair out, it's totally understandable to reach for something to help your baby not "reject" meds. Of course you should consult with your pediatrician before doing anything to your baby's medicine. But, you might not have to resort to such lengths with these tips to help you get that medicine down.