The Use of Coughing Drugs on Children

Coughing is a symptom that most of the children with acute infection on the top of breath channel. In daily practical, the absorption of cough medicines are often not based on understanding and consideration of both the benefits and the risks increase the use of cough medicine that is less rational. For examples, in daily, there are too many absorption of types of cough medicine in a prescription (polipharmacy) and / or the use of doses that are too high, said dr. Rianto Setiabudy, Strategy seminar at The Clinical Approach to the Professional Children Coughing, some time ago, in Jakarta.

There are many cough abating medicine that is used in some countries, for example, codeine, dekstrometorfan, prometazin, various other antihistamine, mucolithic, etc.. Although widely used, in fact some of drugs has some efficacy which does not exceed placebo, the others the efficacy is not based on evidence-based medicine. The note also that, in general, these drugs have side effects.

Based on the occurrence time, the experts generally divide cough in the 2 groups, namely acute cough and cough chronicles. Acute cough will be calm in 1-3 days even if it had not been given any medication for self-limiting.

The medication of acute cough should be based on efforts to find and overcome the causes, not with the type or dose of cough medicine. Cough etiology chronicles the children also appeared frequently with different etiology in adults.

In the medication of cough is recommended to do the watch, wait and review.

In the use of cough medicines should also be understood that cough is one of the defense mechanism of the body is important. Therefore, the cough reflex can not be pressed too great with the drugs, even the manifestation is a dry cough.