Is honey a cough remedy? Does a teaspoon of honey before bed really calm a childs cough?

Question:

Is honey a cough remedy? Does a teaspoon of honey before bed really calm a child’s cough? To test the folk remedy, pediatric researchers at Pennsylvania State University carried out a designed study involving a sample of 105 children who were ill with an upper respiratory tract infection (Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, Dec. 2007). On the first night, parents rated their children’s cough symptoms on a scale from 0 (no problems at all) to 30 (extremely severe). On the second night, the parents were instructed to give their sick child a dosage of liquid “medicine” prior to bedtime. Unknown to the parents, some were given a dosage of dextromethorphan (DM)—an over-the-counter cough medicine—while others were given a similar dose of honey. Also, a third group of parents (the control group)

gave their sick children no dosage at all. Again, the parents rated their children’s cough symptoms, and the improvement in total cough symptoms score was determined for each child. The data (improvement scores) for the study are shown in the table below.

a. Construct a dot plot for the coughing improvement scores for the 35 children in the honey dosage group.

b. Refer to part

a. What coughing improvement score occurred most often in the honey dosage group? image text in transcribed

c. A MINITAB dot plot for the improvement scores of all three groups is shown below. Note that the green dots represent the children who received a dose of honey, the red dots represent those who got the DM dosage, and the black dots represent the children in the control group. What conclusions can pediatric researchers draw from the graph? Do you agree with the statement (extracted from the article), “Honey may be a preferable treatment for the cough and sleep difficulty associated with childhood upper respiratory tract infection”?