By Jessica Downey

For kids, back to school means excitement and anticipation. For parents, it means colds, flus, rashes—and back to the doctor. Come September, along with their art projects and homework assignments, kids start coming home with an array of germs that leave them—and the rest of the family—sick, sapped, and cranky. However, there’s no need to resign yourself to a season spent at the pediatrician’s office and a medicine chest filled with prescription meds. Experts agree that using holistic, homeopathic, and alternative remedies can resolve common kid ailments. And when it comes to your kids’ health, not reaching for the big pharmaceutical guns right away makes good sense.

“People naturally want to give kids medicine if they aren’t feeling well because they want to help them get better,” says Roy Steinbock, MD, an integrative pediatrician in Boulder, Colorado. “But illness is part of life. Suppressing symptoms at all costs is not a good approach.” And while conventional medicine has plenty of merit, some treatments come with potential risks of their own and don’t even get to the root of the problem, says Lawrence Rosen, MD, a pediatrician at the Whole Child Center in Oradell, New Jersey. “Medicine used to be very ‘one-size-fits-all,’ which doesn’t treat kids most effectively,” says Rosen. “It shouldn’t be a decision between conventional or alternative treatments. The approach to helping kids feel better should really be integrative.”

Of course, many parents feel nervous going outside the generally accepted guidelines, especially when their child gets sick. So we asked pediatricians what they deem to be the safest and most effective natural solutions for the five most common ailments. Here’s what they had to say.


Ear Infections
Often signaled by fevers, tugging at the ears, and congestion, ear infections—one of the most common of all childhood complaints—can cause excruciating pain for your kids, making it difficult not to fill that prescription for antibiotics immediately.

“Most pediatricians are taught that ear infections are best treated with antibiotics,” Rosen says. But holistic practitioners and conventional pediatricians don’t agree. “We want fewer antibiotics prescribed to kids,” he says. What’s more, studies show that antibiotics don’t always work. First, many ear infections are not bacterial—and antibiotics only clear up bacterial infections. Secondly, antibiotics target bacteria indiscriminately, so they wipe out good bacteria along with the bad. And finally, growing immune systems can become dependent on the drugs, says Dana Ullman, MPH, DHM, and author of The Homeopathic Revolution (North Atlantic Books, 2007). “If you treat with antibiotics too soon in the inflammation process, your child’s body doesn’t learn to identify what has infected it. Her body then depends on the antibiotic to fight the infection for her.”

Furthermore, an ear infection—viral or bacterial—will often clear up without the aid of drugs. “More than 80 percent of the time children recover from earaches just on the strength of their own immune system,” says Kathi J. Kemper, MD, professor of pediatrics at Wake Forest University School of Medicine in North Carolina. However, if you and your doctor decide antibiotics are the best course, Kemper recommends simultaneously giving your children probiotics, which contain beneficial bacteria, to replace some of the good bacteria that are lost.

If you decide to steer clear of medication, try