Dr. Chheda – One of the most annoying symptoms is cough.

Now there are different types of cough. There can be that dry kind of scratchy cough in your throat – you can just drink some water and then that’ll soothe your throat and it should be fine.

There’s also the cough like if you choke on food, coughing to try to get it out. You know, pat your child on the back, they’ll get it out and that cough goes away.

Then there’s the asthmatic cough where they’re just trying to take a deep breath and they just can’t, and they’re wheezing and they’re coughing. Please give them their albuterol, whether it’s by the nebulizer or by the inhaler. Just give them their albuterol. A cough at that point is a signal that their asthma is acting up and that you need to treat the asthma.

Then you can have the dry, barky cough at night, which is a sign of croup. And for croup it has its own set of instructions. But the cough that’s most annoying is that wet cough. Your child has got a runny nose and just mucus is pouring out of their nose, mucus is draining down the back of their throat, and they’re just coughing and coughing and coughing and coughing because they can’t blow their nose or they can’t clear up that mucus. They’re not able to hack up all those loogies.

What do you do for that kind of cough? Absolutely nothing! You don’t want to treat the cough at that point. The cough is protective. It is protecting the lungs from all that mucus draining down. If you were to stop the cough, all that mucus will drain down into their lungs and turn it into a pneumonia. You don’t want to stop that cough.

What you want to do is you want to dry up the mucus. Once the mucus is gone, the cough automatically stops. So think about drying up the mucus, whether that’s using saline and having your child blow their nose a lot, whether that’s using an antihistamine to dry up the mucus. But you want to get rid of the mucus. Once you do that, the cough will automatically stop.