Flavored spray marketed to children to make taking pills 'enjoyable' ... toddlers now being prescribed antidepressants

Saturday, November 05, 2016 by: J. D. Heyes
Tags: children, flavored medications, antidepressants

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(NaturalNews) Parents generally do not enjoy fighting with their children to get them to take pills when they are sick, but a new spray to make medicine easier to swallow may do more harm than good.

As reported by CNN, swallowing pills can be difficult both for adults and kids when suffering from certain illnesses. To make taking pills even more difficult – say, when you have a sore throat – often doses must be taken a few times during the day.

And while pediatricians and parents have been struggling for years trying to improve ways for children, especially, to take their oral medications, they haven't had much luck. However, a small study published in the October 2016 issue of the journal Pediatrics found that a flavored spray called Pill Glide can make taking pills more flavorful and, hence, more enjoyable.

But that might also be a bad thing, especially for children.

Marketing more Big Pharma to kids?

Dr. Catherine Tuleu, a pharmaceutical researcher at University College London, told CNN that there had been "a significant decrease" in difficulty in taking pills with the spray.

"The kids liked to be in charge and to change the flavor," Tuleu – who conducted the small study with colleagues at Great Ormond Street Hospital in the United Kingdom – added.

And that might just be part of the problem.

As Natural News has reported, it's not just the fact that Big Pharma is working to make it easier for kids to take pills that's a problem; it's the kind of pills being marketed to them, including dangerous antidepressants.

Researchers from the Nordic Cochrane Centre in Denmark conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis of 68 clinical studies involving 70 trials covering 18,526 patients in a bid to gauge the use and scope of antidepressants and associated harms, including suicidal thoughts and tendencies, deaths and aggression, as well as akathisia, a form of restlessness believed to increase suicide and violent behavior.

In attempting to determine how antidepressants impacted children in particular, the researchers determined that as a result of poor design of clinical trials that assessed key antidepressants, as well as misreporting of findings in published studies, "the true risk for all associated serious harms ... remains unknown for children, adolescents and adults."

Nevertheless, the researchers concluded that because information was either missing or inconclusive, it was better to restrict prescribing antidepressants to children until a better, more comprehensive study showing more conclusive results could be conducted.

Difficulty taking medicine has long served as a deterrent to overdose

Only, that's not happening. As we have also reported, children as young as a year old are being given these harmful, dangerous drugs.

The UK's National Health Service (NHS) reported that between the months of January and March 2016, the NHS Tayside Trust prescribed antidepressants to at least 450 children. Health officials said that the youngest person prescribed such medication during this particular time frame was 7-years-old, but in 2014, there was an instance where a 1-year-old was prescribed a mood-altering antidepressant.

However, on further review, the trust revealed that in reality as many as four 1-year-old children were prescribed antidepressants in 2014 alone. That's shocking.

And now, Big Pharma is trying to find a way to make taking dangerous drugs like these more enjoyable for kids.

Once upon a time, the medical industry found it beneficial to prescribe and hand out medication that was unpleasant to take – not as a form of punishment, but because the unpleasantness acted as a built-in deterrent to kids overdosing on their medicines. After all, if pills are harder to take, or medicine doesn't taste great, what kid would want to take more of it?

But in today's "progressive" world, nothing is supposed to hurt, make our kids uncomfortable or create a situation in which they have to deal with any adversity.

Sources:

CNN.com

NaturalNews.com

NaturalNews.com