Taking care of a sick child, feeding the baby, and taking medicine are one of the most difficult parenting issues for parents. Therefore, many parents often grind powder to feed the baby, although the medicine grinding powder is convenient for feeding, it is easy to dampen the medicine and affect the curative effect. More importantly, if there are other medicines left in the medicine grinding machine, the child take unnecessary medicine.
Why is it not suitable for powder?
1. Destruction of drug stability: When developing a drug, its characteristics will be considered to design an appropriate dosage form to meet the drug’s stability, avoid moisture absorption and deterioration, etc., to ensure that the expected drug effect can be achieved. The ingredients of the medicine were originally wrapped in layers. If they are ground into powder and exposed to the air, it is easy to make the medicine unstable and difficult to store.
2. Interaction: Mixing and grinding of several drugs can easily cause physical, chemical, and pharmacological factors between different drugs to interact with each other, which may affect the efficacy.
3. Shared grinding equipment and sub-contracting machine: After the pharmacist grinds the powder, although it will be clean, there will inevitably be trace residues after the previous grinding, which may cause mutual contamination between medicines.
4. Drugs with poor taste and irritation of the gastrointestinal tract: To increase the compliance of the drug, the drug will be designed to cover the taste of the drug and prevent local gastrointestinal irritation. After grinding, it may destroy the dosage form and cause uncomfortable reactions, such as nausea and vomiting. Will reduce medication compliance, resulting in poor treatment effects.
Some medicinal products are not suitable for grinding due to their properties or dosage form design
1. Easy to deliquescence. Some medicines are easy to absorb moisture. It is recommended to grind the powder by yourself before taking it.
2. Highly irritating: Not only can some medicines not be ground, but also need to take a lot of water and maintain an upright posture to avoid irritating the gastrointestinal mucosa or oral mucosa.
3. Bitter taste: After grinding, it is easy to reduce the willingness to take the medicine, and the compliance with the medicine becomes worse.
4. Soft capsules: The contents are often liquid and not suitable for milling.
5. Enteric-coated tablets and mouth-coated tablets: After grinding, these drugs will be destroyed in the stomach and cannot be absorbed in specific parts, which will reduce the absorbed dose, reduce the efficacy, and even fail to reach the site of effect.
6. Sustained-release dosage form: Grinding powder will destroy the controlled-release method of the dosage form, so that the drug will be released rapidly, causing the blood concentration to rise too high, exceeding the appropriate range, and increasing the chance of side effects.
If there is no special medicine for children, it must be ground. How should you feed it?
If you have a child who is too young to swallow the medicine, you can prepare a small mortar at home to grind the powder by yourself when using ordinary tablets. It is recommended to use the powder on the same day. For medicines, please use a medicine cutter to cut the tablets into half or quarters before grinding, or first cut the tablets of the current dosage into small pieces, put them in a spoon, add a small amount of water and crush them. When taking it, pay special attention not to cut or grind all the medicines at one time, to avoid crushing the medicine, moisture deterioration, or uneven dosage. If it is a preschool or elementary school child, parents can start to let him practice the action of swallowing medicine. In the beginning, the tablet can be peeled in half to facilitate practice. Sometimes parents add medicines to milk or beverages for the convenience of feeding medicines. The best drink for taking medicines is warm water. Water can help medicines enter the stomach smoothly from the mouth and will not stick to the esophagus, which is more helpful. Due to the disintegration and absorption of medicines, the calcium ions contained in milk may be combined with medicines. Other beverages such as fruit juice, tea, coffee, wine, etc. may affect the effect of medicines, so it is not recommended to use.
