If you want your child’s cough to get better quickly, do you need to use antibiotics to treat it?

The truth: This is not the case. Children do not necessarily need antibiotics when they have a cough.

Analysis: Cough is a symptom (respiratory tract) that can be caused by a variety of diseases or reasons. Common causes in children include colds, rhinitis, sinusitis, bronchitis, pneumonia, asthma, foreign bodies, allergies, postnasal drip, etc.

Among these diseases or causes, bacterial infection is only one of the causes and is not as common as viruses; and antibiotics are only therapeutic drugs for bacterial infections.

Even if the cough is caused by a bacterial infection, different drugs, dosages and courses of treatment need to be selected according to different pathogens and different sites of infection. Antibiotics need to be used under the guidance of a doctor. Parents should not give their children antibiotics on their own to avoid poor treatment effects or other adverse consequences due to inappropriate medication, inappropriate dosage, insufficient course of treatment, etc.

Therefore, if the child's cough does not have other accompanying symptoms, such as fever, nasal congestion, runny nose, shortness of breath and other abnormal manifestations, parents do not need to worry too much. If there are these abnormal conditions, or if you really cannot judge and are very worried, you can also take the child to see a doctor in time, determine the cause of the cough through the doctor's diagnosis, and carry out targeted treatment under the doctor's guidance.

Author: Fan Yunzhu, Chief Physician of Jiahui Medical

Review | Pan Chunchen, deputy chief physician of the Department of Otolaryngology, The First Affiliated Hospital of University of Science and Technology of China