Doctors Warn Traditional Home Remedies Can Harm Sick Children

Parents often turn to unregulated home remedies to ease children’s pain or fever, but staff at Dana-Dwek Children’s Hospital in Tel Aviv say those fixes are frequently making treatment harder and, in some cases, more dangerous. The article cites coffee grounds on cuts, unpasteurized goat milk for mouth sores, alcohol for fever, toothpaste on burns, and warm olive oil in the ear as examples of common practices that can send children to the emergency room.

One mother, Hadar, said she put black coffee on the cut of her second-grade son, Nadav, after he was injured while playing in a public garden. She believed it would stop the bleeding, but it did not, and doctors later told her the substance made cleaning the wound more difficult and potentially more painful. Nurse Sivan Mzor said the pediatric emergency department sees such cases at least once a month, including injuries involving coffee, turmeric, or cinnamon in wounds.

Mzor warned that these substances can cause infection, inflammation, and foreign particles to get into the wound, while also making it harder for medical staff to disinfect and assess the injury. In one case, she said, doctors had to use deep sedation instead of mild sedation simply to clean a wound properly. For mouth sores, she said unpasteurized goat milk can contain harmful bacteria and may require further evaluation, hospitalization, or even intravenous antibiotics in severe cases.

She also cautioned against rubbing alcohol or vinegar on a child to reduce fever, saying alcohol can be absorbed through the skin or inhaled and cause poisoning, while vinegar can irritate the skin and eyes without proven benefit. For burns, toothpaste may give brief cooling but can irritate the skin, cause infection, and obscure the severity of the burn. For ear pain, hot olive oil can burn the ear canal and worsen an eardrum perforation. Her advice is to consult a doctor or nurse before trying home remedies, because children are more vulnerable and a seemingly simple natural solution can do more harm than good.