Two years ago, at a Stop & Shop in Rhode Island, the Danish neuroscientist and physician Henriette Edemann-Callesen visited an aisle stocked with sleep aids containing melatonin. She looked around in amazement. Then she took out her phone and snapped a photo to send to colleagues back home.
“It was really pretty astonishing,” she recalled recently.
In Denmark, as in many countries, the hormone melatonin is a prescription drug for treating sleep problems, mostly in adults. Doctors are supposed to prescribe it to children only if they have certain developmental disorders that make it difficult to sleep—and only after the family has tried other methods to address the problem.
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Fun fact: melatonin is often more effective in very specific dosing… Overdoing it by even a very small margin can have the opposite the intended effect.
It’s almost as if messing with hormones blindly without proper knowledge is a terrible idea.
Considering the societal normalizing of drugging children to sleep as a “joke”, I’m not in the least surprised. The US has an illness related to legal drug abuse, via things like alcoholism as the primary entertainment option and generations of cigarettes / caffeine / etc …
I know these things are absolutely not unique to the US, but it’s startling to see the difference in scope and acceptance here vs many other countries.
…Melatonin is a prescription drug???
Wow, not that way in Canada. I cans buy “organic” melatonin here in dozens of different formats… pills, gummies… Oops.
