My son, Max, has just recovered from a viral illness, one that produced noisy breathing in him last weekend. It was scary, and I suppose anybody reading this would think to themselves, "Wait, she's a pediatrician, she should know how to deal with a child's noisy breathing." Somehow it is different when it's my own child who's ill, and because I am not so good at making decisions when it comes to my own kids' health, I had my partner look at Max. We decided to give him a two-day course of oral Prednisone, a corticosteroid, to reduce the inflammation of his airway. It did the trick and helped him breathe more comfortably.
Steroids have a bad reputation with the general public; we hear of doping scandals in the Olympics, and the news media hypes up stories about athletes and anabolic steroids. But corticosteroids in medicine are in a different class altogether; they are used to treat everything from asthma and croup to lupus and vasculitis. The main side effect of steroid therapy is stomach irritation, but this can be averted by antacid therapy if needed. Primarily acting to suppress inflammation, corticosteroids do have great utility and benefit.
