Recently had a prescription error with my two month old baby. The doctor prescribed 7 times as much iron supplement as they intended (confusing labelling - so while I'm annoyed, I can see how it happened). This went on for a month until we uncovered the error.

We had blood test done (on the doctor's recommendation), and luckily there is no sign of any damage, but prescription errors do happen (even if they are rare) and it's much easier with liquids (you probably wouldn't give 8 pills to a baby, but 8ml doesn't seem so bad).

Paracetamol pills are labelled by age (and weight), available over the counter. So quite often we tend to under dose our child as children grow fast.

Calpol is paracetamol as a liquid - that's what we were prescribed after the vaccinations.

> Which is much harder to dose correctly when the kid spits or drools it out.

Never met a non autistic child who would spit or drool out calpol. I'd take the stuff myself as an adult it tastes brilliant.

> Total culture shock for me, as in Europe the default for children is rectal ingestion (which is probably a culture shock as well for Americans)

Huh are you talking about new born babies or something? I've been to a few different EU countries and you can buy liquid stuff for kids in the chemists. (Spain, france, germany, italy) source me as a child getting the stuff when I was sick abroad and the local doc sold my parents basically some off brand calpol.

Liquid Panadol flavors were totally useless with my son. He would spit it out or upset himself so much he'd throw it up.

We ended up crushing and diluting tablets in milk, which he would drink (you waste a lot of milk to hit the right factor).

As someone in the US, I've only used liquid tylenol for my kids when they were infants and pills were a choking hazard.

Otherwise, it's much easier to get them to take a pill than drink a liquid.

Rectal pills use a different route than oral ones and are very safe.

Yeah, this is another rabbit hole. It seems to be Northern Europe and Japan that do rectal pills. Some countries only recommend them as backup.

I think the mistakes also come when the child spits out part of the liquid, and parents give another dose.