Drugging Children is Most Common Form of Child Abuse: Docs
Maimonides Medical Center's Dr. Estevan Garcia suggests that giving a cranky child cough medicine in a bid to make him/her sleep is not less than a child abuse. He warns that the practice could be lethal for the child.
Parental misuse of cough medicine had almost taken life of one Texas infant recently, revealed Amitava Dasgupta, a toxicologist who was called in to consult on the case. The infant was admitted to the Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center "in bad shape". The child was immediately shifted to the intensive care unit and put on a ventilator, he added. The child was given one dose of "cough medicine in the afternoon and one in the evening to put the baby to sleep so it wouldn't disturb them," Dasgupta revealed.
The expert said that he suspects that the mother occasionally used the trick to make the baby sleep. It’s not clear though whether the child was given an adult or pediatric dose. "The baby became unresponsive ... and almost died from an overdose of dextromethorphan, a common ingredient in cough medicine," he said. "In this case, it was not an intentional overdose, it was lack of information." Dasgupta highlights the fact that doctors never recommend that the kids below age two should be given cough syrup or pain killers without consulting them. He also says that many young parents are not aware about this. Dasgupta also happens to be a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at University of Texas-Houston Medical School.
The overuse of drugs on children is an under-recognized issue, claims Dr. Shan Yin, a toxicology fellow at the University of Colorado and the lead author on a new study on the topic. Even though the caregiver doesn’t intend to harm the child, it still falls under child abuse, Yin said, and doctors need "to be aware of this kind of issue", as they would be on alert for signs of physical or sexual abuse in a child.
