Doctor’s Easy Hack For Helping Your Child Get Better Faster
Posted on March 6, 2025
A children’s doctor has shared a simple trick that parents can do to help their children recover from a common cold faster.
A new study found that saline nasal drops in a sick child’s nose every day reduced the amount of time that kids were sick with a common cold by up to two days. Not only that, but it also reduced how contagious the cold was as fewer family members in the same household got sick.
TikTok pediatrician Dr Meghan Martin shared the hack with parents, saying it’s a ‘cheap’ and ‘easy’ way to ‘get better faster and get fewer people sick’.
She said: ‘This is a simple way to decrease the amount of time that your kids are sick, decrease the amount of medications that you have to give to them, and decrease the amount of people that they get sick in your home.’
Sharing the results of the ELVIS-Kids randomised controlled trial, Dr Martin continued: ‘This recent publication shows that giving kids hypertonic saline, which is salt water in their nose a few times a day for about five days, can decrease the amount of time that they are sick by about two days and decrease the number of people in the home that they get sick.Doctor’s Easy Hack For Helping Your Child Get Better Faster
‘There were 407 kids enrolled, around 300 of them ended up getting sick. Half of them did the saline and half of them just did normal cold and flu stuff. The kids that did saline got better in about six days, the other kids got better in about eight days.’
Mother helping son to blow nose. PIC: Getty Images
How does it work?
For parents who want to try this hack, Dr Martin said that in the trial they used hypertonic saline nasal drops, which are about 2.6% salt-water, rather than regular saline.
The sick children were given saline drops in their nose, three drops on each side, four times a day for about five days – and the results noticible.
She said: ‘The saline group had 46% get a family member sick, compared to the control group or the normal supportive care group had 61%, so it did decrease the sickness in the household.’
Dr Martin concluded: ‘This is cheap, this is easy and this is low risk and you can get better faster and get fewer people sick, which is pretty cool.’
Parents’ verdict
Girl with the flu in bed blowing nose. PIC: Getty Images
Meanwhile, parents who have used this trick gave it glowing results in the comments, with one mum saying it has made a ‘huge difference’.
One raved: ‘I saw this study several months ago and immediately bought everyone in my home their own saline nasal spray and we have done it religiously every time we’ve been sick!! IT WORKS!!!!’
Another said: ‘I’m telling you, this has made a huge difference in our family over the last year and it’s because of your advice. My daughter would have a cough and be sick for weeks, now we do the saline and blow out all the crap and it takes 2-3 days to go away!’
