College kids return from fall break carrying a wide variety of things. Care packages, clothes, belonging, illnesses, cures. Of course these last two things are not like the others, but illness happens a lot when travelling. But don’t fear. Luckily if you’re going or leaving home, mom is readily available with an arsenal of medication to offer as a cure. She may even send you home with some prescription medicine left over from a previous illness someone else in your family had! Because if it’s prescription that obviously means it cures more diseases than over the counter medicine, and faster too!

Parents pump every medication they can get their hands on into their children at the first sign of illness. Who needs a doctor when you have a local pharmacy mini clinic where the nurse can prescribe you exactly what you want? Any other medication or pain killers are readily available over the counter. Basically you can run into a CVS or Walgreens and get any medicine you want! And this is exactly what parents do. They go buy over the counter or demand a prescription from the mini clinic staff so they can get any medicine that treats their child’s symptoms and proceeds to make their child take all of it. With parents doing this, why even keep doctors around at all? Parents are just as good at giving their children medication! Therefore I propose that parents should be able to prescribe medication for their children without the need for a prescription from a doctor.

After all, mother knows best. If you have a cough and your mom wants to give you antibiotics for bronchitis and an inhaler just in case it’s actually asthma, that’s her prerogative. Too much medicine can’t be a bad thing, right?  Better to cover all your bases.

Of course all the warning labels on the prescription bottles say don’t take them with any number of other medications. The prescriptions also require specific dosages, or they have a dictionary full of side effects. Sometimes they even have a duration they have to be taken over. But who wrote those labels? Some doctor, or scientist. Someone who has studied the human body, chemistry, and medicine for years. There is no way that person could know you or your health as well as your parents do! So why those bottles even have labels is beyond me; they seem about as useful as the calories label on a bottle of water.

Now some people may think parents giving their children an excess amount of medication is harmful. As if medicine could be harmful! These people claim that if taken too often, your body will build up an immunity to the drug. They also claim that if you take an antibiotic too often the very bacteria you’re trying to kill will develop a resistance. As if bacteria are smart enough to evolve to resist one of our greatest achievements: modern medicine. Obviously this is not the case. Look how quickly medicine makes you better! And it’s always better to take more than less to make sure the illness has really been cured. There’s a proven positive correlation between taking medicine and an improvement in health. When mom gives you five different cough syrups, allergy medication, and a prescription antibiotic to ensure any possible ailments are routed, she’s really just making sure to kill anything in your body that could possibly cause illness. You will probably be even healthier than before you got sick with all that medicine!

Due to this, I propose that the FDA and all 50 state medical licensing boards approve licenses for parents to write and fill prescriptions for any of their children. This will solve the problem of parents having to battle doctors over what really is best for their children’s health. It will allow parents to get all the medicine their hearts desire to make their children well. It will end the need for a doctor’s prescription that holds parents back from fully treating their children. Parents who apply must prove they are the child’s guardian and that they tend to be an overly precautious parent. If the application is approved, you may expect your license between 3-5 business days after completion of the application. Be sure to check your mail!