October 20, 2005

How to Get Kids to Swallow Pills

I am gonna try this. I will let you know how it works.

From Lisa on one of the autism lists:

Since it seems we have some people new to biomed here I thought I'd post this about how we got our boys swallowing pills. I highly recommend buying this cup. Both my boys have residual oral motor skill issues still and this totally got them going in the pill swallowing department for a very small investment:

http://www.oralflo.com/

It's only been 3 weeks since we got it and now boys are swallowing pills totally independently w/o the help of the cup! The only thing we still need it for is to help Nate get all the Lauracidins down, he actually does better with it if I put about 1/4 of the scoop in the spout at a time instead of trying to swallow them 1 at a time.

What helped us was using the pill cup to swallow frozen peas as practice (Thanks to our DAN! doc for that suggestion). Then we moved on to small gel caps (NN DHA Jr.) once they were good at those we did a slightly bigger gel pill (Thorne SF 722) and didn't try the regular capsules till they were good at the gell ones (since you get many tries with the gel before they are too mushy to keep trying and the regular caps you really only get 1 try before it gets stuck in the spout).

The other thing that helped us was bringing over a peer who swallows pills and having them do it together, then insitutuing a 'race' to see who could do it faster with a prize at the end.

We went from refusing to even try swallowing pills to 100% independence in only 3 weeks. I hope those that haven't gotten this skill down yet get inspired to try. This pill cup was key to getting this skill down, esp. since I talked it up before it's arrival too...(the magic feather affect).

Now they down 1/2 a dozen pills in a minute including 1 that is a size OO (aka BIG!) as well as a scoop of Lauracidin!

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