Your Child's Health

 April 6, 2010

Interview with Dr. Jennifer Trachtenberg, author of The Smart Parent's Guide: Getting Your Kids Through Checkups, Illnesses, and Accidents

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Mike Carruthers:
For a medicine to be sold it must first be tested and proven safe and effective – at least that’s true for adult medicine. But for children, it’s a little different.

Dr. Jennifer Trachtenberg:
Often many, many drugs or medications that we give to children we give to them “off label.” And off label is a term we use as doctors to describe a medication that is given for something different than what it’s indicated for or for an age group that it hasn’t really, specifically been tested on.
 

Jennifer Trachtenberg, M.D.

Pediatrician Dr. Jennifer Trachtenberg author of  The Smart Parent's Guide: Getting Your Kids Through Checkups, Illnesses, and Accidents

And that’s pretty common when it comes to pediatrics. It’s legal and we do it. Probably 80% of the medicine we use for kids is prescribed off label. And it’s mainly because they haven’t really been tested on children for a number of reasons.

The primary reason is no one wants their children to be guinea pigs in a drug trial – so you really can’t test children’s drugs on children.

So we often times extrapolate from adult doses and safety and use them for children – which may be okay. But often times it’s important to ask your doctor how long it’s been used in children and any side effects that are known.

Dr. Trachtenberg says you should never be shy about asking your child’s doctor ANY question.

There are no silly questions. If you feel that your doctor doesn’t want to answer the question or take the time, that may not be the doctor for you. And you have the option of looking for another pediatrician. You have the right and you really should partner with them together.

To hear the complete, unedited interview, click here.