Why do they make kids meds taste like shit?

For a 1 year old no less. I feel bad having to give my baby a full teaspoon of this nasty smelling antibiotics. I have no choice obviously, but couldn't they find something a little more palatable?

I just wore well over half her last dose. :-(

Our vitamin C pills tasted good as kids. Sometimes we would take many more than needed. Fortunately vitamin C is harmless in high doses, but still, you don't want the medicine chest to turn into another cookie jar.

But I can't even get 1 tsp. in her. She NEEDS the antibiotics to keep the tear she got from getting infected (don't ask .. someone tried to do the splits yesterday when she fell and it turned out VERY badly). My almost 4 year old has been on ABX many times for ear infections and none of them were as nasty as this stuff. It's apparently a sulfur based one. Blegh.

"Mom, I don't feel good. Can you front me a bottle of baby aspirin?"

and mom used to give it to us with a spoonful of sugar.

Hell of a kick that stuff had; I loved it:P

Ewwwwwwwwwww. I would have let you have mine, gf. I _hated_ that stuff. :puke:

It was very sharp tasting, like alcohol...and back in the day it had a strong narcotic in it.

It didn't taste like bananas. I think she gave us Kaopectate for diarrhea and that tasted like chalk.

I used to refer to it as the "ubiquitous pink bottle in the fridge." But my kid didn't have to take it til he was 6 or so.


I don't think babies have the same taste receptors as adults, so it probably isn't as big a deal....

She has a much worse reaction to this than even the baby ibuprofen, which she got much better at taking when she had a fever a few weeks ago. She gets a lone drop of the abx in her mouth and she's trying to escape my arms. *sigh* Only 9 more days of it.

hang in there :hug:

Just say no to being sick. And trickle-down economics works.

1. Most pharmacies can add flavoring to liquid medications if you ask. Usually it's free.

2. I've had good luck with mixing liquid medications into strong-flavored drinks (usually soda, which my son normally doesn't get) and getting them down him that way. Short-term that works fairly well, but you wouldn't want to do it long term- I wound up with caps on all my front teeth as a kid that way (which was kind of expected, but the thought was they'd get me to take my meds and worry about my teeth later.)

I recall having to mix some antibiotics with some of this organic yogurt. The kid lapped it up without a clue what it was!!

and young children would get into their medicine looking for 'treats,' often poisoning themselves as a result.

It's unfortunate that they don't taste very good. But imagine the horror you'd feel if your 1 year old chugged a bit of the bottle when you'd turned your back.

My mum used to make the icky stuff more palatable for us by giving a little bit of apple juice as soon as we'd taken it to wash the taste out.

difficult, if not impossible, to mask with any flavoring agent or food known to humans.
When our cat particularly hated taking his prednisone, I took a wee taste -- VERY bitter, and mixing it with baby food chicken (his favorite), pudding, yogurt, pill pockets, or anything else didn't help. We had to resort to using one of those pill pusher thingies.

Some meds have only a mildly disagreeable taste, which can be masked by flavorings or mixing with something sweet. But with others, you are just SOL.

You might try asking the pediatrician if there is something else she can take which is not quite so bitter. Or you could try mixing a bit of the one you've got now with other things and tasting it yourself to see if it can be made palatable - it may or may not be possible. A compounding pharmacy sometimes has a wider choice of flavoring agents to mix in, which may or may not help. Amoxicillin (which tastes pretty good in its liquid form) is, unfortunately, not the most preferred antibiotic for infections of the urinary tract or surrounding area. Maybe the doc could give you a topical antibiotic to apply to the area, and have you observe closely, holding off on using the oral med as long as it doesn't look like infection is setting in...

Good luck - I feel for you.

:scared:

(Slightly off topic, yes, but still... :scared: I hope your baby feels better.)

My son has been used to taking pills at an early age and took to it quite easily actually. He'd much rather take a pill than take some yucky medicine. He's got some Tylenol/Codeine right now for pain if/when he needs it and he hates taking that. There was also something they gave him in the hospital - he pretty near chucked up after taking it. For him, pills, suppositories, heck, even intravenous medication is preferable to him than awful tasting medication.

Mark.