Cough Syrup

There are a lot of cough syrups marketed for kids. Unfortunately, most of them don’t really do much and have never stood the test of randomized control trials better than warm apple juice or warm tea with honey and lemon for kids over 1. If you look at the ingredient list for a lot of the “natural” cough syrups for kids, they are just mimicking or even including a mixture of apple juice/cider and some sort of pectin sugar or syrup like honey with a few other botanicals in there just for the heck of it. Save your money and just always have a jug of real organic apple juice in the fridge for cough and cold season ready to be warmed up for sipping with snotty and coughing kids.

Very rarely will pediatricians prescribe cough suppressants. It has become very out of vogue to just throw around prescriptions for cough suppressants such as those with codeine (which is in the same family as morphine) for a few reasons. First, hey, let’s keep kids off opioids, cool? The second is that we often want the kiddos to cough to get this mucous up and out of the body. Only for really debilitating coughs will you see cough suppressants being prescribed.