DD wont take her medicine - any suggestions????

[Wills]

DD is 3yrs and although we are still at the stage where she will let me put a spoon of medicine into her mouth she wont swallow - just spits it out. I've tried offering sweets etc. I've also tried forcing it - which apart from being a very distressing event for both of us doesn't achieve very much more because she still spits it out. Normally she's excellent at taking medicine, indeed with Calpol she has her mouth open the moment she spies the bottle. I don't want to loose that by forcing the medicine into her but at the same time she's too young to reason with i.e. its in your mouth anyway - just swallow. Any ideas?

How about disguisng the medicine in an empty Calpol bottle?

(Am I a devious and wicked mother?)

No - bad idea - it would probably put her off Calpol too. In some ways it's easier to get medicine into a furious spitting cat than a toddler. If you got a syringe and squirted it (gently) into the side/back of her mouth would it go down her throat or would she still spit it out?

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My poor 3 yr old son went through about 4 courses of different antibiotics just before Christmas, so as you can imagine the novelty wore off long before we were finished.
I explained to him that he needed to take the medicine to feel better and get rid of the germs - and also tried the bribery route of a sweet afterwards - and the combination of the two kept him going without too much resistance

Counting and seeing if she can swallow it before you get to three or whatever, with a sweet if she manages it?

Perhaps any pharmacist mumsnetters could let me know if we did the right thing a couple of years ago when ds was prescribed some antibiotics.

Normally, ds loves all his calpol and cough syrup type medication but he hated the antibiotic which we were advised to store in the fridge. In the end we thought he didn't like the fact that it was so cold and poured the dosage out about half an hour before he had to take it so that it reached room temp. This worked for us and ds took the rest of the antibiotics without any problem. I am not sure if the half hour or so outside the fridge will have diminished the benefits of the antibiotics or not.

We use syringes to give our DS his medicine - if you squirt it into the side of his mouth then he will swallow. Its a lot less messy, though obviously you still have to persuade him to stay still.

my 6 month old has to have salt solution 3 times per day because of a bowel disease, tastes like salty sea water - euch, and he has to have 15 mls per day so it is quite a lot. I express some milk and give it to him in this before I feed him when he is nice and hungry. Sometimes it is a struggle, but if I try squirting it in to his mounth neat he just coughs it back up. I also give him calpol (which he hates) this way. Another mum whose baby has the same condition was told by a dietician that milkshake flavour powder (like the Nesquick stuff only I don't support Nestle) is really good at masking the taste of medicine in milk if your baby has a sweet tooth, but I would have thought it is best to only do this after four months.
Apparently you can also get medicine dummies from mothercare.

JoWobble, your poor ds the salty water sounds awful! hope it works

I tell DS that he has to take it because the Doctor said so and the doctor might get cross if he doesn't ... is that bad?

My dd, nearly 2, would take calpol but not the antibiotics she was prescibed. But if I put it into one of the cups from her toy teaset she would take it no problem! A 3 year old might wise up to this trick though!