Cut to my family's kitchen in New Jersey, circa 1978—I've got a head cold and my mother is convinced that drugstore pills and syrups won't help. And so, like thousands of other children before, I'm sitting with a towel over my head, inhaling vapors from a steaming pot of water seasoned with a tablespoon of Vick's VapoRub menthol-based balm. (Entire cultures in Asia swear by the stuff.) And whether the 15-minute steam bath helps or not, I'm certainly not willing to go another round. Afterwards I lie convincingly: "I feel better! Much better!"

As a board-certified pediatrician today, though, I'm sorry to report that medical science hasn't made much progress since then. In fact, things seem to be getting worse—the Food and Drug Administration recently advised parents against using cold medicines for many kids. In their place, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends clearing toddlers' noses with rubber bulbs, lots of fluids, maybe some Tylenol, and a humidifier for the child's room. (If I were a kid, I'd think a methol steam bath was preferable to a good, hard nose-sucking with a big rubber bulb, but I digress.)

I'm going to give away a dark little secret: Nothing that a pediatrician recommends for your child's cold is well studied and indisputably effective.

Part of the problem is that almost no one is studying colds in kids. The biggest trial done in the past 15 years involved—of all things—Echinacea (it didn't help, but did cause rashes). No similarly big studies about commonly available over-the-counter meds for kids have been done. (The only study I could find since the early 1990s included only 30 children near Seattle.)

Even simple advice is suspect; in 2005, the prestigious Cochrane group said there's no evidence that drinking fluid helps colds; instead, fluids "may cause harm." You know it's time to turn down the rhetoric when even a glass of water can be dangerous. Add that to the recent worries over over-the-counter cold medications, the fact that almost 75,000 overdoses of Tylenol are reported annually, and the crazy unproven rumor that flu shots cause autism—it's no wonder the average parent is ready to detonate with stress.

So it's important to say that while most remedies may not help your child, it's pretty unlikely that any of them will hurt.

Let's first talk about cold medicines. Yes, it's true that over 300,000 calls about the drugs were made to poison control center nationwide from 2001 to 2005, and a few children even died, probably from decongestant overdosing. That's sad and scary. But it's critical to point out that children get hurt by dosing foul-ups, not normal use. In the medical literature to date, there is no report of a healthy child who had serious injury or death clearly caused by cold medicine used at the proper doses.

Remember these things to keep your child safe when using cold medicine:

• Be careful with dosing cold medications, and your child will almost certainly be safe. Dosing can be really confusing. For example, infant Tylenol is over 4 times more concentrated than Children's Tylenol, though they look similar.
• Don't ever refer to doses with tea- or tablespoons; always use milliliters measured with a syringe. A tablespoon is 3 times bigger than a teaspoon—it's easy to mix up. And always know how much your child weighs.
• Read the labels. Some cold medications can contain up to five different ingredients like fever reducers, decongestants, anti-cough ingredients, and more, and different brands may have difference concentrations and doses. I think drug makers should list the active ingredients in large letters (perhaps with a standardized, color-coded package) in an obvious manner, and flag each of the three ingredients that are dangerous when overdosed: decongestants, anti-histamines, and acetaminophen.
• Don't mix and match different cold preparations in the course of a child's illness—if you choose to use one, stick with it.

Back to the awful truth: Most likely, nothing is really going to help, but it's reasonable to try anything from VapoRub steam baths to humidifiers to (very carefully) measured doses of cold medicines as long as you keep expectations in check. Today I talked with a pediatrician friend who spent all morning seeing colds, and joked that we often just make up stuff for parents to do so they don't feel helpless. In the meantime, the problem gets better by itself (this is similar to most pediatricians' approach to colic in newborns).

In all honesty, it's best to keep most cold away from doctors, since in one study, almost two-thirds of visits for colds resulted in inappropriate antibiotic prescriptions, which don't help symptoms and also contribute to resistance. Of course pediatricians can help some infections, like bacterial pneumonia, with antibiotics. But most kids with upper respiratory infections don't need them; after all, 85 percent of ear infections improve spontaneously, regular colds don't get better faster with them, and even the symptoms of strep throat don't respond. (Here's a little known fact: we treat strep throat with antibiotics to prevent rheumatic heart disease, not to relieve symptoms).

The bottom line: Feel free to try something to treat your child's cold. It probably won't do any harm or good. And on the off-chance you discover something that truly works, don't forget to tell us all about it.

Dr. Darshak Sanghavi is assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Massachusetts Medical School and the author of A Map of the Child: A Pediatrician's Tour of the Body. His Web site is DarshakSanghavi.com