Drug companies-our kids!

I was reading a article today in yahoo news that drug companies made a decision to tell parents that it is no longer safe to give children under the age of 4 cold medicine. Why does it take 7,000 children going to an emergency room each year to figure that out? It is truly mind boggling to me that we are in a country that has relatively unlimited medicine at our disposal, yet the drug companies and the FDA can't seem to promise that the drugs they are approving and selling will actually prove beneficial. How many times do we hear that a product was taken off the shelf because it harmed too many people and is a risk to your health? What happened to the days of teaching people how to take care of their bodies by watching what foods they eat and by getting enough exercise and rest.

Medical development has provided medicines and vaccines that have saved a lot of people from deadly diseases to date. Is the underlying problem today in the cost of research that these drug companies face? Has that cost forced them to market drugs that don't really benefit the people taking them, or even possibly harm them in ways the research has no way of predicting?

As a mother I have a responsibility to look out for what my children are exposed to. I do my best to keep them home if they're sick to make sure they're not exposing others to sickness. I realize also that it is my job as a parent to make sure that what I am putting in their little bodies is indeed a benefit to them. It is so easy to believe that you are doing the right thing when you are giving them medicine that is considered "safe". I know a mom that put cold medicine with a childproof top up out of her child's reach only later to find that her child had somehow gotten to it, opened and drank it without her knowledge or the child's understanding of what it could do to them. It turned out that the child didn't have to be taken to the hospital, but the mom told me it was the scariest thing she had ever gone through. We as moms need to be aware that even when medicines are carefully prescribed by a doctor and thoughtfully considered by you, they can still potentially be very harmful to your child.

I guess there is alot of wisdom in the old saying "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure..."