Taking Medicine

Well I should have known.... After all the times I said Zander was brilliant at taking medicine cos he was so used to it, he's now refusing. He screams & screams, clamps his mouth shut & if any gets inside he spits it out. At 1am this morning he had a temp of 38 so we tried to give him some nurofen, he screamed & struggled so much that he vomited. The worst thing was that I didn't know how much he had taken in so had to wait the however many hours to give him more (not that we did cos he slept through after that).

So now, he's woken from his sleep & he says "25?" no idea why he calls the thermometer 25 ??? So I checked his temp & it was up to 38.6 now. I got out the panadol & he started to cry. I was making milo for him at the same time & asked if he wanted me to mix it & he said "yes please", so I did & he had the whole lot no problems.

So two questions - is it ok to mix medications with something else? How do you get your kids to take medicine?

Sarah, quite often I have had to mix medicine with either milk or cordial to get them to have it. Paige was the worst for not taking it. Depending on the flavour of the medicine (nurofen is orange I think and panadol is strawberry or cherry) I would mix it with something of that flavour to hide it better - so orange medicine got mixed with orange cordial and the strawberry etc got mixed with pink milk. just make sure that you don't make them a big drink when you do it or they might not drink all of it.

You can get strawberry nurofen now as well, which my kids prefer to all others.

Love

I always mix mine in with something if they won't take it. The only one that won't drink if i have added anything to it is Eleanor. But most times they are all good at taking something.

My eldest, now 7, is a shocker to get to take anything!!! I have found the best way is to put a tiny bit on a spoon, with a bit of icecream....bit by bit. Takes a while but she manages to get it down and keep it down!!

As frustrating as it must be - it is very cute Sarah!

In answer to your question about whether or not you can mix medication with food - it depends on the medication. Panadol and neurophen are usually ok. It is recommended that neurophen always be consumed at the same time as food otherwise it can cause problems for your tummy (whether it is an adult or child taking it). When giving other medications - check with the pharmacist first. It has to do with how the food and medication react together and therefore potentially altering the effect of the medicine. It is the same for giving multiple medications - the way they interact when given together can alter the effects.

HTH

MG

Remember when we were kids and medicine tasted like medicine? Mum used to mix it with red cordial cos that was the strongest flavour (to try and mask it) - I still cannot face red cordial - ever....

Hi Sarah my Xander sometimes carries on over medicine, mind you some of them are pretty horrid. For panadol we shopped around to get one he likes which is now the strawberry panadol but before that it was the amcal brand or something. DS is really open to bribery so we always have jellybeans on hand so it's medicine with a cordial chaser and a jellybean (not so good for the teeth but it does the job) There was one, cough medicine I think and I ended up mixing it with about 10ml undiluted cordial - it was the only way he would down it.

DS has the strwaberry vanilla chemists own too, its the only paracetamol he'll take.
He'd had temps around the same as Zanders for the past 4-5 days, and I'm going back to the doctors today cos if nothing was wrong or he getting over something, as the doctor put it, I'm sure it should be back to normal already

Anyway he has always been really good at taking medicine, to the point where he asks for more (!?) until this morning, when he spat it out and started laughing hysterically like it was the funniest thing in the world! I so hope it was a one of thing and he goes back to normal soon...