My son had a cough a few weeks ago.
There’s no reason you should care about that. You have your own problems. But it tore me and my wife up. He'll be two years old in a couple months, and he spent most of last year having at least two coughing fits per night. Our pediatrician said it was either allergies, asthma, or an enlarged adenoid gland. She picked asthma and prescribed an albuterol inhaler.
(See, one of the key diagnostic criteria for asthma is nighttime coughing. But then again, our boy didn’t meet any of the other criteria—no shortness of breath, no wheezing, no chest retraction on inhalation. But the treatment for adenoids is surgical removal, and the treatment for allergies is antihistamines, which aren’t recommended for kids under two. I like our pediatrician and trust her, but in this matter let’s just say she wasn’t exactly House, MD. Last time we saw her she looked at our boy and said, “I have no idea why you’re coughing.” He pointed at her nose.)
After the jump: How trying to fix his cough caused me to abandon reason.
My mom, concerned about her only grandchild, forwarded me an email. Now, I’ve edited stories that touched on the dangers of mom-forwarded emails, but Mom’s no dummy. I’m only going to quote part of it:
I went to the invaluable urban legend debunking site Snopes, searched for “Vicks,” and found this entry.
Upshot: No one knows. But Snopes did helpfully point out that the idea’s been around for at least five years as an anecdote, and that there’s no such thing as the Canada Research Council. There’s a
National Research Council Canada, and as far as the Snopesters could tell its head has never said anything about Vicks one way or the other.
Thing is, though, my wife swears by Vicks Vaporub. Before she got her allergies medicated properly, she was convinced that Vicks was the only thing that was letting her sleep through the night. I scoffed—the main active ingredient in Vicks is menthol, which makes you feel like you’re breathing better because it activates the receptors for cold on the inside of the nose and mouth. Your brain interprets “cold” as
“increased airflow.” Vicks, I said, is nothing but minty fresh Vaseline.
Some Googling on Vicks (and reading the list of ingredients on the back of my wife’s jar) revealed that the stuff also contains oils of eucalyptus and thyme—eucalyptol and thymol, if you’re feeling chemically-inclined. Both of them seem to have some ability to suppress coughs, maybe because they help thin out mucous.
Anyway, my kid was coughing. So I put my skepticism aside, rubbed the
Vicks on his feet after his nighttime bath, put his pajamas on and put him to bed.
It didn’t work at all. He coughed himself awake twice.
I mean, of course it didn’t work, right? What kind of universe would it be if putting something strong-smelling on your feet and then covering it with two layers of fabric—socks and footie pajamas—could have any affect at all on something going on in your lungs?
Plus, nothing works 100 percent of the time, guaranteed. Anyone who tries to tell you different is selling something or wrong. That should have bothered me more in Mom’s email. What did I lose by trying?
Well, my dignity and self-image as a scientifically-minded journalist, for one thing.
On the other hand, if I’m going to really take that mindset all the way, then I have to acknowledge that my lack of success with pediatric/podiatric Vicks doesn’t actually mean that the stuff doesn’t work. The brilliance of the scientific method doesn’t rest in the first steps of any experiment—the formulation of a hypothesis, the development of a test, the collection of observed data. The tricky bit, the best bit, is in the interpretation of that data: the statistics.
One of the reasons I often feel so at sea as a father—no, no, don’t write in with words of comfort. I’m not freaking out—is that everything
I do is based in intuition and personal experience. And I have just enough training in science to know that those things are often meaningless if you want to be right. The human brain is built to extrapolate pattern from anecdote; the universe operates on the odds.
A few weeks ago my old sensei Sharon Begley wrote an article for Newsweek called “Just Say No—To Bad Science.”
In it, she applied her keen mind to explaining why research on controversial subjects like the success of sex education in reducing teen pregnancy, or whether or not a given chemical is toxic, seems so often inconclusive or contradictory. Here’s her upshot:
I abandoned methodological rigor when I spread that Vicks on my kid’s feet. When you’re awake at 3:00 AM, listening to your child in distress and knowing that neither you nor your doctor can do anything about it, scientific methodology goes out the window. You don’t just try anything, you try everything, all at once—vaporizers, Vicks, cough medicine that you’re not supposed to use on little kids. And you hope that the statistics that define good science and let us make sense of our world don’t apply to you, personally, just this once. You want the anecdote to be true. You just want to find the right accidental combination of mint-scented Vaseline, cherry-flavored antihistamine, and the azimuth of the moon that night so your son can get some sleep.
Eventually my son got over his cough. His asthma went away, or he grew into his adenoid, or whatever he was allergic to stopped extruding pollen. Or he got over his cold. Who knows? I know a ton about pediatric cough now, and none of it helped him get better.
Anyway, now his nose won’t stop running.
