Medicine Hack

Medicine Hack

This hack for medicine is mainly for blind parents but could also be used by a sighted parent for ease or convenience.

For the life of me, I could not figure out how to give my son Tylenol if he needed it for teething etc. There was no way to figure out how much liquid was in the syringe. Even if I made a tactile mark on the outside, there was still no way to determine the amount of liquid inside of it. Messing around with medicine is definitely not something I want to do.

I called my son’s pediatrician and spoke to one of the nurses and posed a question to her. I asked if I had someone pre-fill a syringe or two with the correct amount, would it work or be safe for him? I asked this in case I was home alone with my son and he needed Tylenol. She said absolutely and thought it was a great idea.

The nurse said, pre-fill the syringe and put it in a plastic bag to keep it from being in the open air. She mentioned keeping it for maybe a week or so. She also explained to me that the cap on a Tylenol bottle, for example, is not a sterile cap and therefore what would be the difference if the liquid was in the original Tylenol bottle or in the syringe.

If it were a sterile bottle with medicine or a vaccine, she stated that due to efficacy issues, we would not be able to use this hack as altering the cap or medicine changes it’s potency etc.

When giving your little one Tylenol, or medicine in general, put the syringe in between their lips or partway in their mouth to the side of one cheek and squirt the medicine into their mouth. Our son does pretty well with medicine now but something we try to do if it works out is give him the medicine while drinking his bottle. We pull the bottle out of his mouth briefly, he sucks the medicine down and then we put the bottle back into his mouth. This makes us feel better since he is washing down the medicine instead of spitting it out.

This hack can be used with other medicines such as the Zarbee’s cough medicine I spoke about in a previous blog, or whatever your little one might need.