Kids Rx Pro | In The Press
HEALTHCARE NEVER TESTED SO GOOD: Kids' medications and vitamins have been reinvented as gum balls, lollipops and frozen treats.
If you’re a kid, and you like candy—which, chances are, you do these are complicated times. Candy is your jurisdiction: the stuff of Halloween, birthday parties, and Saturday morning cartoons. More than a third of food commercials targeting you sing its praise. And yet, responsible adults want to keep you from it. So much so that Britain, for one, has banned advertisers from selling it to you at all. Meanwhile, you peek into your mom’s medicine cabinet, a place historically reserved for brown bottles with small type, only to find that cold medications and multivitamins have miraculously transformed into Barbie and SpongeBob-themed Pixy Stix, jelly beans, gum balls and freezies! What’s a six-year-old with good intentions and a weakness for Laffy Taffy to do?The bucketful-of-sugar approach to administering kids’ health remedies has never been more pervasive. Tylenol now sells its children’s formula with “Flavor Creator” technology, giving kids a choice of flavour crystals—apple, bubble gum, chocolate and strawberry—to sprinkle into its tangy Cherry Blast liquid. Dimetapp sells gummi bear-shaped lollipops to soothe kids’ sore throats. Cold-Eeze claims its bubble-gum balls provide all-natural cold relief. And Pedialyte Freezer Pops offer a “cool way” to prevent dehydration. Meanwhile, just about every popular kids’ character— Dora the Explorer, Disney princesses, Rugrats—is pushing sugary multivitamins.
In Manhattan, two new pharmacies, Cherry’s on the Upper East Side and KidsRx in the West Village, are being hailed as the sugar mountains of their trade. Both focus exclusively on finding ingenious ways to get children to take their medicine. Unlike your typical drugstore, these shops—formerly affiliates, but now competitors—are small and intimate, with brightly painted murals and electric trains that circle the stores on overhead tracks. Their speciality is pediatric compounding; medicines are actually mixed and customized on-site, just like in the old days.
On the wall of KidsRx is a “Tasty Meds” menu board, which lists options for flavouring prescription medicines with concentrated oils: cherry, banana, watermelon, grape. This is only a sample of what’s available, says owner and pharmacist William Brownstein. “We have 800 flavours,” he says—chocolate, tutti frutti, cotton candy, peanut butter. “If you can think of it, we can do it.” Depending on the prescription, kids can choose a liquid, gel, or even lollipop form. And they can personalize the bottle with cartoon stickers.
The advent of KidsRx and Cherry’s represents an overall push in the drug and vitamin industries to appeal directly to this younger demographic. According to the U.S. trade publication Drug Store News, kids ages 5 and under are the greatest users of prescription drugs after senior citizens. “The market is billions,” says Brownstein. “And people will spend anything on their children.”
Of course, the trouble with marketing medicines to kids, says Kathleen Glass, director of the biomedical ethics unit at McGill University, is that “the product that’s most appealing to the child isn’t necessarily the one that’s best for the child.” Moreover, when have kids ever been good at laying off the candy? According to the Ontario Poison Centre, 43 per cent of all reported poisoning cases involve kids under the age of six. An enormous number of calls to the centre every day, says Heather Ferries, a nurse educator there, are related to candy-themed remedies. “The most common call is a child who thought this was candy and has taken an overdose,” she says. “Or mom’s not sure how much is missing from the bottle, so the centre has to help figure out the worst-case scenario.”
Many of the products contain only tiny amounts of active ingredients (making them overpriced junk food). “But some of the cough and cold medicines, say, that are made to look like freezies contain decongestants and antihistamines,” says Ferries. “Even some of the gummi-bear vitamins contain vitamin A and iron. These are ingredients we’re very concerned about if enough is ingested.”
Even Brownstein, who is arguably the Willy Wonka of pharmacists, is surprisingly critical of over-the-counter candy meds. “What we’re doing with compounding,” he says, “is for a child who has an infection, or, God forbid, needs chemotherapy. A lot of these medicines are very, very bitter. They’re nasty. We make it seem fun and easy. But really what we’re doing is so vitally, unbelievably important.” On the other hand, he says, gummi-bear vitamins are just sugar. Ever heard of a salad?
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