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Why Are So Many Kids Overdosing on Melatonin? - The Atlantic

theatlantic.com · 1,045 words · saved by 1 readers

Pediatric overdoses have increased by 530 percent over the past decade.

In the dark, early days of the coronavirus pandemic, Michael Toce noticed a surprising trend. As a pediatric-emergency-medicine doctor at Boston Children’s Hospital, he was seeing lots of kids who had taken too much medication. The problem wasn’t that they’d overdosed on opioids or painkillers or marijuana. Instead, they’d swallowed too much melatonin, an over-the-counter supplement used as a sleep aid. The ill effects of this mistake seemed mild at the worst—drowsiness, nausea, vomiting—but the number of kids who were affected was going up, up, up. Other doctors around the country were observ

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