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Cough and cold medications are mostly useless, and in children, can be dangerous. People get a lot of health advice from pharmacists and indeed they're an important part of the health care system hopefully making doctors' prescribing safer. But I must say you do have to wonder about the quality of pharmacists' advice when you see some of the garbage they have in their shops and the potential conflict of interest they have in flogging you something. Cough and cold medications are a good example. They're mostly useless, and in children can be dangerous. In the United States there has been considerable controversy over marketing cough and cold preparations for children. There's little evidence they do anything, and they're behind thousands of calls to poisons centres and probably some deaths. The theoretical risks are of abnormal heart rhythm, hallucinations, and other brain disorders such as encephalopathy. Outrageously, no-one is even too sure what the right doses are for young children, since the doses have been calculated as though kids are small adults – which they're not. Specific research in children really needs to be carried out before parents can be confident about using cough and cold preparations. So why not instead spend the money on a happy movie and a box of paper hankies?
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