It's NOT Baby Aspirin; it's low-dose.

As children stopped taking Aspirin, Reye's syndrome almost disappeared.

Reye's syndrome posed a danger to children when I was young. It was rare but lethal. Today? We rarely hear of Reye's. Why? The relationship between Aspirin (ASA), its use in children and Reye's syndrome was recognized.

The orange-flavoured chewable labeled Baby Aspirin disappeared from drugstore shelves. The powerful drug is now known as low-dose Aspirin.

And yet, today, we still encounter folk using the former name. Even doctors are known to fall into the trap, referring to low-dose Aspirin by it now out-dated-for-a-reason moniker. What puzzles and appalls me is that journalists, those purveyors of truth and accuracy constantly get the name wrong. Where are the editors? In forced retirement, I'd guess.

Aspirin is a drug, a powerful drug and, as with all powerful drugs, taking it comes with risks as well as rewards. If one is healthy, taking even a low-dose Aspirin once a day has always been a questionable practice. As they say: "If it isn't broken, don't fix it."

That said, if you get your medical knowledge from the main-stream media, you might be forgiven for thinking otherwise. The media has a history of presently the taking of low-dose Aspirin as relatively innocuous, almost risk free. To underscore this point, the media often refer to low-dose Aspirin as Baby Aspirin. What could be safer?

This is NOT news. The recent report simply confirms common concerns.

The media should not link babies and Aspirin for the same reason that Bayer changed the name: it was found that parents, especially new parents, thought the low-dose product was made for use by children and infants. It's not. Not today.

I take low-dose Aspirin and it  frightens me. As the Harvard Medical School pointed out:

If taking Aspirin was risk free, it might make sense for everyone worried about heart disease to take it. But Aspirin does have risks.

It can potentially lead to hemorrhagic stroke (bleeding inside the brain). In the stomach, Aspirin can aggravate bleeding ulcers. Severe gastrointestinal bleeding can be lethal.

Aspirin is NOT for babies nor children no matter how low the dose. Nor is taking Aspirin completely risk free even for healthy, adult folk. It's a powerful drug and deserves to be treated as one.

I knew that. How? Because my doctors made the risks associated with taking a daily low-dose Aspirin very clear to me. Why doesn't my daily newspaper, and the rest of the MSM, get the story right? It's not difficult and it would lessen the danger of children mistakenly being given low-dose Aspirin.