Of course, these are not independent of each other, just different levels of looking at the situation. I raised it because arguments like “Well, this is what my child needed” don’t address the wider seachange we’ve seen re: kids and drugs in general.

Here you have a so called, “Respected National Organization” saying Parents arent to blame,and you go silent…What a Wuss..Learned that term from my kids!!!

Couldn’t agree more. But that same misinformation can play a big part in a physicians decisions. As a medical professional I see that misinformation every day. As a parent I made decisions based on misinformation.

As I’ve said before, I don’t have the answer, but what we are doing now isn’t it.

I was the one who said that your average (key word: average) person probably cannot fully and adequately understand a journal article and I stand by that. I also don’t think your average person can fully understand a legal brief, stock prospectus, architectural plan, computer code, string theory, Gravity’s Rainbow, or any other highly specialized document.

But I’ve never said they shouldn’t be informed or that they should just go along with what their doctors say. Rather, they should work with their doctors (along with whatever information they’ve found) to decide on a course of treatment.

However, part of the problem is that even with being informed, there is so much misinformation out there from myriad (unchecked) sources that the lay public doesn’t have the background necessary to assess everything critically.

Let me reframe the issue of who is ultimately responsibile. Logically, it’s the parent who puts the pill in the child’s mouth. Logically, it’s the doc who writes the script (except for OTC). And logically, it is obvious that the industry has found a market for millions of scripts and OTC meds on an entirely different scale than just a few years ago.

I don’t think it serves us to try to separate one part of this contellation from the rest. A hell of a lot more kids are being given a hell of a lot more drugs. Beyond what that may mean in any particular instance re: what is medically appropriate, we clearly have a cultural and public health phenomenon here.

The question becomes: Will we have the will, the ethics, and the science to view it with as much objectivity as can be mustered.

Nathan, looks like I struck a nerve. If your baby is one of the rare ones who has an actual issue with acid reflux, then you certainly should medicate that child, since that is what it is designed for. If, however, you are doing it for your “sanity” so you don’t have to hear your baby cry, then maybe you should have thought about what being a parent really entailed before doing so. After all, I’ve yet to see on the indications panel of Prilosec “use when parent is tired of hearing their baby cry.”

The argument you make makes me think of the parents who exercise no discipline over their children at the grocery store or in a restaurant, who buy minivans with televisions in the headrests so they don’t have to talk to their children in the car, overmedicate their children with drugs both OTC and prescription, and then sue companies when their child has an adverse reaction or attempts suicide due to the anti-depressants they administered to their children.

I hope you aren’t going to become one of those parents, Nathan.

http://www.naminj.org/programs/educating_the_educators/educating_the_educators.htm