One night last week, Victoria had an upset stomach and woke me in the middle of the night complaining that she was nauseous. Instead of propping her up in the bathroom and crawling back into bed myself (which I seriously considered…aren’t I compassionate at 3 a.m.?), I offered to go downstairs and find something to settle her stomach. I remembered that I had bought a medicine specifically for nausea a while back. Surely this would do the trick.
Now, fifteen months of reading labels apparently has a subconscious impact because even though I had no contacts in my eyes and was rummaging through my own cabinet, I clumsily grabbed the bottle and flipped it over to read the label – out of sheer habit. And am I ever glad I did!! Having purchased this medication prior to my knowledge of ingredients, I am unsure how it escaped being dumped during the last medicine cabinet cleansing. What I read made my groggy eyes spring open and my mind race into action. “FD&C Red #40,” “Methylparaben,” “flavorings.” (Seriously? They call “flavorings” an appropriate ingredient listing????) These things have no place in my home, much less my child’s body. I tossed the bottle into the trash and returned to tell Vic that we were S.O.L. on tummy meds.
I don’t know where her nausea came from, but it was gone by mid-morning. With no meds – thankfully. And I vowed to reclaim my medicine cabinet so that minor medical maladies creeping up at ungodly hours of the night can be resolved without me going into a fit of rage aimed at the Food and Drug Administration.
Because, really…who wants to go back to sleep thinking about the FDA? Eewww.
Last summer I ditched a whole slew of medications because they contained the certified artificial colors (the ones with name and number) that I was avoiding in our foods and products. I can’t help but think of the irony…petrochemicals are dangerous to our health – maybe not in the supposed 0.2% maximum recommended/allowed by the FDA in a single specific product, but the cumulative impact of multiple products is never addressed. I believe the consumption (orally or topically) of these chemicals is responsible for a significant amount of our health woes in the first place. Is it not ironic that our protective agencies allow those same petrochemicals to be put in the formulations of our medications whose purpose is to heal? Is there not something fundamentally wrong with this picture?