A recent social media video challenge encourages people to cook chicken in NyQuil (acetaminophen, dextromethorphan, and doxylamine) or another similar OTC cough and cold medication, presumably to eat. The challenge sounds ridiculous. But it could also be very unsafe. Boiling a medication can make it much more concentrated and change its properties in other ways. Even if you don’t eat the chicken, inhaling the medication’s vapors while cooking could cause high levels of the drugs to enter your body. It could also hurt your lungs. Put simply: Someone could take a dangerously high amount of cough and cold medicine without even realizing it.

An earlier TikTok challenge urged people to take large doses of the allergy medicine diphenhydramine (sold OTC in many products, including some under the brand name Benadryl) to try to induce hallucinations. Prompted by news reports of teenagers needing to go to the emergency room or, in some cases, dying after participating in this challenge and taking too much medication, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) warned the public about the danger of high doses of diphenhydramine.

The FDA recommends that you both OTC and prescription drugs away from children, and lock up these medications to prevent accidental overdose.

Sit down with your children and discuss the dangers of misusing drugs and how social media trends can lead to real, sometimes irreversible, damage. Remind your children that overdoses can occur with OTC drugs as well as with prescription drugs.

If you believe your child has taken too much medication and is hallucinating, can’t be awakened, has had or is having a seizure, has trouble breathing, has collapsed, or is showing other signs of drug misuse, call 911 immediately.

More information from the FDA may be found here.

Photo Credit: USDA