Our child won't take medicine

BWZN93

No wonder he gags if he is being dosed with a syringe. Imagine what that's like, squirting in your mouth! It makes me gag and I'm an adult! Put it on a spoon!!

CRANKY40

I also have a child that can't have calpol. The first time he vomited after taking it at 4 months old we didn't realise and he wasn't even ill then, it was his recommended painkiller before his immunisations. It dawned on us after the second massive upchuck some months later that calpol possibly wasn't the way forward. The pharmacist said he was probably sensitive to the base that the paracetamol is mixed into and gave me medised which had it's own drawbacks. More than half a spoonful and he was awake all night (that wasn't how it was supposed to work) plus when I went to buy more I was given the "baby poisoner" look at the chemists.

My son seems to have sensory problems in general and there are a lot of things he can't eat without gagging like banana, jelly, jelly sweets, anything orange flavoured and so on. Luckily I taught him to take tablets as soon as he was old enough and the antibiotics he had to have last year were given in capsule form by our helpful GP. He is 10 now and honestly he's not being naughty. Some children are just over sensitive to taste and texture.

Lunar_Eclipse

[QUOTE=CRANKY40;68421187
My son seems to have sensory problems in general and there are a lot of things he can't eat without gagging like banana, jelly, jelly sweets, anything orange flavoured and so on. Luckily I taught him to take tablets as soon as he was old enough and the antibiotics he had to have last year were given in capsule form by our helpful GP. He is 10 now and honestly he's not being naughty. Some children are just over sensitive to taste and texture.[/QUOTE]

Sounds like he could be intolerant to these things. So not allergic which requires medical intervention, but sensitive enough to them that his body doesn't like them.

My daughter is the same. Bananas make her gag and she feels physically sick and uncomfortable when she eats eggs. Neither appear to be life threatening though (which is what I think a true allergy is medically speaking.)

She also cannot tolerate artificial sweeteners, which I think is behind her problem with calpol and nurofen, which she always threw up. This infuriates me (the whole sweetners thing caus they are everywhere and so many people can't or don't want to consume them) but like your son, she moved to tablet drugs years ago, with the added benefit of it being very money saving!

Piriton and a sedative called Phenergan also cause problems for her.

Laconic

Something that works really well but isn't popular in the UK are suppositories. They're widely used in France and have many advantages: no taste, no nausea, precise dosing, no pain and work far faster than oral medication. Is it worth asking the GP if any of the requisite dose are available?

I was good about taking medicine as a kid, but there's one particular one that provoked such nausea that even to catch a whiff of it, 30 years on, is to make me heave. I feel for your son. And I feel for you.