The Pharmaceutical Industry Has Convinced Me That I am a Bad Mother

By Judy Fox, CIS Senior Compliance Manager
judyfox@cis-partners.com

Despite enjoying a wonderful Mother’s Day with my family, our industry often makes me feel like a bad mother. This month it’s the folks at Pharmaceutical Formulation & Quality (PFQ) who are calling my motherly aptitude into question through no fault of their own. Thank goodness my children are grown, or the pressure from our industry to spare them yucky tasting medicines would be too much to bear. Instead I am just questioning the way I treated them when they were sick, and find myself feeling guilty about not feeling guilty, which is a big burden for an Italian-Catholic.

I read an industry article in the April/May 2009 issue of PFQ entitled, “The Taste of Success – Choose your drug flavor carefully to improve patient compliance.” 1 I am fascinated by the flavor business and the studies on patient compliance based on the taste and flavor of medicines, especially those for children. After all, there is genuine science to the patient’s response to certain flavorings and aromas in medications. My local pharmacy even has a sign instructing all of the good parents to ask about the variety of flavorings offered to make their children’s medication more appealing. If it tastes bad there are parents who will go back to the pediatrician and ask for something else. I used to work for a pediatric pharmaceutical company, and the taste of medicine was a weighty issue. We held frequent taste tests for reformulations and product launches. The taste and flavor was also a selling point emphasized in the marketing materials for the medications we manufactured. The interesting thing is that our medicines were indicated for children as young as two months old. That’s the age that children drink baby formula – have you ever tasted that stuff? I don’t think even the good parents of the world have ever asked their pediatrician for a better tasting baby formula.

While my children are all healthy adults, we did have our share of illnesses and hospitalizations. Some serious – two cases of bacterial meningitis, several illnesses that required hospitalization, and a few operations - and plenty of cases of strep throat, mono, ear infections, and even one combined case of Lyme disease and West Nile virus just to keep us on our toes and test our sanity. My point in mentioning the details is that these illnesses were treated with medicines we had to administer at home. I don’t remember any of my three sons ever saying, “Yum! That tastes good!”, nor do I remember caring if they liked the taste. What I do remember was going through the same ritual that I went through as a kid; the boys would hold their nose with one hand and hold a glass of water in the other. For really foul tasting stuff, they were treated to a Popsicle.© I thought offering my kids a Popsicle© was especially smart of me when I was treating strep throat. I never even considered calling the pediatrician to see if there was any tastier medication on the market. I wanted them to get better, so the matter was not up for discussion. I will admit, other than an asthma inhaler, they never had to take anything for an extended period of time, so maybe that would have made a difference in their long term “compliance.” I reason it out like the allergy shots that my oldest had to have for 4+ years. He got used to it. There are cultural foods that many people refer to as an “acquired taste,” and while I never understood why you would keep eating something you didn’t like until you acquired a taste for it, maybe medications can be an acquired taste as well.

I like to think that I would have been somewhat concerned if the taste of their medicine was really good, because then I would have worried about them wanting it all the time. I admit that I didn’t have the special locks on the toilets and medicine cabinet. I just didn’t let them play in the bathroom – or under the kitchen sink for that matter. I know that things can happen in the blink of an eye and you can never be too careful, but there is a degree of worry that seems like overkill and there is a degree of pampering our children that I just don’t understand. I may have missed the memo, but when did kids start deciding whether or not they were going to take their medicine?

In the mean time, I will have to second guess my kids’ childhood until they all start presenting my husband and me with grandchildren to babysit. I will make sure that I do everything right this time. I may not have been the ever-vigilant mother, but there is not a chance that I will risk being anything but the world’s greatest grandma! If they want bubble gum flavored medicine, they will get it. Heck I may even give them a Popsicle© too!

Source:
1 Pharmaceutical Formulation & Quality, Volume 11, Number 2, April/May 2009. “The Taste of Success, Choose your drug flavor carefully to improve patient compliance.” by David Tisi.