Neighborhood Doctor: What to do if your child has the common cold?
In this episode, we'll delve into the topic of managing the common cold, a frequent challenge faced by parents of young children.
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Our Host
Dr. Ryan Hassan
Transcript:
Dr. Ryan Hassan: (00:02)
I am Ryan, pediatrician and dad here to answer my patient's most common questions. You're picking up your five-year-old from her second day of daycare and she starts coughing and sniffling on the car ride home in the next few days. She gets a fever, stops eating and wants to sleep all the time. What do you do? Common cold can be challenging to manage, so today I'm gonna talk about how we treat it. Most codes are gonna improve within a few days. In the meantime, there's no medicines that eliminate the illness. There's nothing you can take that will magically get your child to be better. We have to let our bodies fight it off on our own and fortunately our bodies are really good at this. What we really need is just plenty of rest because our bodies are working hard to fight off this infection, so it's important to sleep.
Dr. Ryan Hassan: (00:43)
Lie down, don't overexert yourself. Make sure your child is getting rest. Children fortunately are really good at this. If they're really sick and need to rest, they'll rest. If they're running around and playing, then they don't need to rest. They'll be fine. As a general rule, it's okay to let your child act the way they feel like. It's also important to make sure they're drinking lots of fluids. Now, this is something that we are not naturally good at. Children and adults tend not to drink enough fluids, and if we're sick, that problem becomes much harder because we easily get dehydrated when we are breathing faster, have high fevers or sweating more or peeing more because of an infection. So it's important to make sure you're drinking lots of fluids or that your child is drinking lots of fluids throughout the day. Sometimes it can help if your child is over a year old.
Dr. Ryan Hassan: (01:28)
You can try tea with honey or other cough syrups, which have been shown to be effective for managing the pain and discomfort of a cold, and can be at least usually as at least as effective as something like Tylenol or Motrin, which you can also use to manage the pain. It's important to know that a lot of children won't eat much when they're sick, and that's okay. They might even lose a couple of pounds when they're sick. Generally, as long as they're drinking fluids, they'll be just fine. They can go several days without food. As long as they're drinking, that appetite will pick up when they feel better. You usually do not want to give antibiotics if it's a cold, it's caused by a virus. An antibiotic is not gonna help. You generally wanna avoid cough suppressants and of their over-the-counter medications because they generally aren't that helpful and they can sometimes be harmful, especially for really young children.
Dr. Ryan Hassan: (02:14)
What you'll expect is that with a cold children's symptoms will tend to worsen for three to five days, and then they'll start to improve in the next three to five days. If that's not the case, if kids continue to get worse after five days or so, or they haven't started to turn the corner after week, it's good to check in with your pediatrician. Or of course, if before that they have any concerning trouble with their breathing or they're feeling really confused, disoriented, or you're just worried, it's always a good idea to ask your doctor. Other than that, make sure your kids getting fluid rest and they should feel better within a week and a half and be back to normal going back to daycare and get sick again in another week, and you'll have a chance to practice all over again. That's my show. If you have medical questions you'd like me to answer, reach out to Boost Oregon online.