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No child looks forward to being sick, much less taking medicine to feel better when they do. If it were up to children, the main treatment for most minor illnesses would be plenty of candies, unlimited video games, or maybe even the freedom to stay home from school just once.
Unfortunately, this is a situation where parents truly know best; sometimes, taking medication is the solution. It’s at these times when finding ways to make it easier and safer for your child to take his or her medication comes into play. This article will discuss how pediatric compounding can make parents feel at ease when it comes to giving children medication.
Complex Medication Needs
Medicating children is complicated and often difficult. Their smaller bodies and faster metabolisms often demand dose changes and depending on how small they are, may even necessitate delivery format changes, too.
Even when the dosage is correct, children are more prone to adverse side-effects and interactions. Risks seem to be the highest for infants and newborns, gradually stabilizing by the time most children reach around 12 years of age.
The fantastic news is that pediatric compounding really can help to make medicating your child a less stressful experience. Through pediatric compounding, your pharmacist creates the ideal custom medication to match your child’s treatment plan. He or she follows the doctor’s prescription and then seeks to make the medicine easier to take, less likely to cause side-effects, and safer for your child.
Dosage Adjustments for Size
Commercial medications come in exact doses, and those doses aren’t always suitable for children, much less newborns and infants. Giving a dose that’s even a few milligrams or micrograms off can be the difference between success and severe side effects, so getting it just right matters.
Unfortunately, even age isn’t a perfect predictor of required dose; two little ones can be the same age but may be completely different weights or heights.
Because commercial drugs come in predetermined doses, that can leave your little one’s dosage well outside of the spectrum of what’s available. Giving a slightly higher or lower dose or changing the delivery format on your own (e.g. crushing pills) seems like a viable solution, but it’s neither reliable nor accurate.
Instead, pediatric compounding allows the pharmacist to calculate the exact dose-per-weight ratio for your child. He can then work out exactly how much medication is safe and suitable for your child’s condition. Each prescription is tailor-made for your child!
Removing Allergy-Inducing Fillers
Parenting an allergy-prone child can be incredibly stressful and downright frightening, especially if your child experiences anaphylaxis. Though it’s rare, some children do seem to react to certain fillers, binders, and dyes in medications. Unfortunately, it’s not always obvious to identify potential allergy triggers in a pill, liquid, patch, or aerosol medication.
For kids with allergies, compounding can quite literally be a lifesaver. Because pediatric compounding strips the drug down to base ingredients, pharmacists can remove as many potential risks as possible while maintaining treatment efficacy.
If you know what substance is triggering the allergic reaction, the pharmacist can leave it out. If you’re not sure which filler is the problem, the pharmacist can re-compound the medication with fillers or binders with a lower likelihood to trigger allergies in the first place.
Depending on the drug, it may be possible to compound the base drug into flavoring or delivery systems alone instead of with binders, fillers, or preservatives. That’s particularly useful when trying to identify unknown allergy triggers.
Combining Multiple Medications
You know your child can’t stand taking medicine. They kick up a fuss, run, hide under the couch, and spit the pill out. It’s no fun for anyone when taking medication is a struggle. Whether you’re treating something like an ear infection or long-term, chronic childhood conditions, the prospect of mediation time can become something to dread. Add multiple medications into the mix, and that struggle begins to telescope into a potential nightmare.
Here’s the thing: if your child doesn’t ingest the drug, it’s not helping. Combining multiple drugs shown to be safe when taken at the same time into a single delivery format reduces the amount of time you spend struggling with your child, and most importantly, probably results in more medicine reaching your son or daughter’s system. It gets all of you through medication time with less muss, less fuss, and happier family members all around.
Though it isn’t possible to combine drugs in every case (contraindications and negative interactions may exclude combination medications as an option) your pharmacist can mix many medications into a single capsule, patch, cream, aerosol, or liquid.
The potential for combinations is extensive, including:
- certain antibiotics
- specific seizure drugs
- combination medications for conditions like ADHD
Instead of three or four doses, you only need to worry about convincing them to swallow one, making it much easier on the entire family.
Dye-Free Pediatric Compounding Solutions
There’s good evidence that food dyes may trigger sensitivities in little ones. By far, the most common trigger seems to be red lake dyes (specifically Red 40), but it’s difficult to predict how children will respond to dyes of any color. Some little ones experience allergic reactions, while others experience hyperactivity. Some experience migraines, stomach upset, and other more subtle undesired responses.
Current evidence shows that children with ADHD may react to food dyes at a higher rate than children in other patient populations. The same research tells us there is a link, but it doesn’t say exactly how far that link extends and whether it’s just correlation or causation.
Truthfully, we just haven’t reached a point where we know exactly how, what, why, or when medication dyes affect children. What we know so far is that there is a potential risk.
Researchers continue to probe the issue for conclusive evidence one way or another, but in the meantime, many pediatricians recommend parents avoid dyes altogether whenever possible.
Dye-free compounding produces medications that don’t contain dyes, drug preservatives, and other potential triggers, ameliorating the risk of triggering these sensitivities in the first place. It’s not a sure-fire way to reduce side effects, but it is a proactive way to protect your child until researchers are sure.
Delivery Format Changes
Delivery format (how your child takes his or her medication) can be just as important as the medication dose itself. The wrong delivery format will make it difficult or even downright impossible for a little one to take their medication with ease. In the case of infants and newborns, it may even pose an additional choking hazard.
The most obvious example of this concept is pills and infants three months of age or less. These little ones aren’t yet old enough to know how to swallow properly, and thus, a pill isn’t a suitable delivery format for them. Even older children can struggle with unusually large tablets. Sometimes it’s just as easy to have the pharmacist reformulate your prescription.
Your child’s particular health condition may also indicate a need for a delivery format change. A child with pneumonia often benefits more from liquid inhalation via aerosol delivery rather than a pill or liquid antibiotic. Likewise, children treated with CBD derivatives for seizures certainly can’t smoke marijuana (though not every pharmacy offers CBD processing just yet).
In cases like these, your pharmacist can re-compound the base drug into the best delivery format for your child. As treatment goes on, he or she can utilize pediatric compounding to continuously adapt the treatment to better suit your child’s waxing or waning needs.
In Conclusion
Pediatric compounding strategies aren’t always about improving treatment; sometimes, it’s just a way to make the experience easier for your child. As a whole, it may include:
- adding flavors to bitter or bad-tasting medications
- creating aerosol inhalation mixtures to treat pediatric asthma and other lung conditions
- creating liquids from pills or capsules from powders
- reformulating everyday medications into painless patches or creams for easier application
Either way, the primary goal is that your child spends less time struggling with the medication and more time being his or her happy, healing self.