How you can easily harm a child you love
Despite all the things toddlers and kids can accidentally get into around the house, it looks like they may be in the biggest danger from what we give them on purpose!
I’m talking about medications, both Rx and OTC ones, that are way too easy to dispense in dangerous doses.
And this problem isn’t just because moms, dads, and grandparents are being careless. It’s largely due to drug manufacturers making it as difficult as possible to accurately measure out these meds.
New research out of NYU’s Langone Medical Center has found that well over 80 percent of parents in its study made at least one dosing error when giving drugs to tots.
And practically a third of them made a “large error” — the kind that can send you rushing out to the ER in the middle of the night, or worse.
It’s a classic Norman Rockwell scene — Tom Sawyer is being forced to take a dose of medicine by a stern Aunt Polly. And, if you look closely, you’ll see she’s dishing it out in a spoon.
Unfortunately, a lot of us are still giving our kids and grandkids drugs the same way! And it turns out that what you may think of as a “spoonful” can be wildly inaccurate.
But even if you use more precise methods of measurement, you can still be way off track in the doses you’re giving them.
The Langone researchers recruited almost 500 parents with kids younger than 8 years old and gave them a variety of typical package instructions on how to measure medications for a child.
They found that the parents were much more likely to give a wrong dose when the instructions gave different ways to measure out a drug, such as choosing between mL or a teaspoon. Another problem: the size of the syringe matters. Trying to give a 2 mL dose in a large syringe can get confusing — sort of like trying to measure a fraction of an inch with a yardstick. Also, when administering drugs to children, a picture is worth a thousand words of instructions!
This isn’t the first time the problem has been researched. But it seems no matter how many times the topic comes up — usually after a tragedy occurs — not much actually changes.
Two years ago, a study in the journal Pediatrics found that the doses of medications given to kids were more often wrong than right!
And, unless you’re used to dealing with converting different forms of measurements, the very way drugs are labeled can lead to errors. For example, the label of a med may say to give half a teaspoon, but inside the box you’ve got a little plastic cup with lines measuring out milliliters.
And if you’re literally using a spoon, how do you know when it’s half-full, anyway?
Then there are the different abbreviations for teaspoons, tablespoons, and milliliters! For something so important, you would think there would be a well-established standard across the drug industry by now.
But the sad truth is that there isn’t.
So, next time you need to give a tot some cough syrup or any other type of liquid drug, here are the most important things to remember:
- Ditch the little cups, teaspoons, and tablespoons and buy a lined syringe (or request one from your pediatrician’s office or pharmacist).
- If the dosage is in teaspoons or tablespoons, use a syringe that is lined for that, not an actual spoon.
- If there’s any confusion, ask to see exactly where the dose line is. Even better, draw a line on the syringe at the right fill point.
- For some drugs, such as acetaminophen, there is very little wiggle room for an overdose that can cause serious harm. Don’t estimate and think a little more won’t matter — because many times, it really does. (That’s why Tylenol should be avoided whenever possible for both kids and adults!)
- Never swap out an adult med for a child, unless there are specific dosing directions for kids — then follow them to the letter!
The above ways are much safer than Googling your way to learning the metric system!
And if there’s any possibility that you may have given your child or grandchild too much of a med, don’t hesitate to call a poison control center (which can be a great resource when it comes to getting quick advice), as well as your pediatrician.
“Most parents give kids wrong doses” Alexandria Bachert, June 27, 2017, MedpageToday, medpagetoday.com
