After a Vaccination, should you give your Child Pain Medication

After a Vaccination, should you give your Child Pain Medication like Tylenol?

When your child gets a vaccination - for flu, for polio or anything - you expect that the child will get a little bit of fever; nothing to worry about, it's just the way the body works as it tries to build up a better immune response. There is nothing to worry about - you just give your little one a bit of fever and pain medication like Tylenol for the problem, and he should be good as new in a couple of days. Right?

The thing is, when your child's immune system is trying to do a little work building up its immune system, fever and pain medications like Tylenol gum up the works. They don't allow the body to get a fever and do its thing. When the body isn't allowed to get a fever, it doesn't build up the immune system as well. That's what the world-famous medical Journal Lancet says.

This is not to be taken as a hard and fast rule, of course. Nothing in medicine is simple enough to be boiled down to one little rule a layperson could understand. For instance, if the fever gets to be too high, then antipyretic pain medication would be essential. You just need to understand that you need work with the doctor for this.

They actually did some research on this. They studied hundreds of babies who had been given standard issue vaccines for diphtheria, tetanus, rotavirus and others. To some, they gave fever and pain medication, and to the others they gave none. The babies who had medication to bring down their fever had fewer antibodies in the end. And that's a bad thing. So unless your child has a problem with having fevers - say getting convulsions or something, you had better stay away from the Tylenol.

If you think about it, it really makes sense. Pain medication like Tylenol has anti-inflammatory properties. And an immune response is your body getting inflamed for a purpose. So when you take anti-inflammatory medication, what you are doing is, you are making your body's immune response weaker. But it depends from vaccine to vaccine. As always, you need work with your doctor. Take the case of the swine flu vaccine, for instance. The body responds very robustly to this vaccine. A little too strongly; it wouldn not really matter if you took care of the fever with a little anti-inflammatory pain medication here; even if it suppressed the body's immune response, there would still be plenty left.