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Your child can't breath? Here, have a placebo!

Well, it seems that we were wrong about the Atrovent. The consultant was really quite down on it for use in one so young and seemed to think that the potential short term side effects were not worth it. I think perhaps that the reason that we've been disillusioned with the consultant appointments in the past is that he's extremely blunt about the fact that there really isn't anything they can do for viral induced asthma, and that's really not what worried parents want to hear. We can throw preventative drugs at it, or not, and the likely outcome will be the same. He cited a couple of research papers both of which looked at giving prednisolone to children with acute respiratory distress, one paper focused on parents administering it at home and the other in hospital. Half of the children in each study were given a placebo. Imagine that!? You think that you're pumping evil steroids into your child because it's your last resort, you're worried to death and you really believe it will work... and yet you're not. You've been prescribed something that was never going to do anything at all. Apparently though, both studies showed no real benefit in the group that took the prednisolone in terms of length of attack, time in hospital etc. He had similarly woeful stories about the effectiveness of Clenil (the preventative brown inhaler) and Salbutamol (the blue one).

I'm going to look those studies up, but I'm really not sure what to make of all this. We're stopping the Atrovent, but he still thought that there would be some 'just in case' benefit to giving Clenil daily in the winter and administering prednisolone at the point where we know in our hearts that it's necessary. But that's the pressure right back on us along with the continued doubt that anything else is really helping, all he could say is that these drugs probably do help some kids...

I have to say I appreciate his honesty and I'd rather err on less drugs than more, it's just sometimes you want someone to just fix it and it's both disappointing and disheartening when there really is nothing they can do other than wait and hope that she grows out of it. He did at least seem fairly positive about the likelihood of that... We go back to see him in four months time.

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