For Dr. Stephen Borowitz, the most frustrating office visits are with parents of kids suffering from stomach-aches and infants prone to spitting up. Often, he says, the parents already know what they want - adult heartburn drugs such as the "purple pill," Prilosec.

"I tell them about non-drug tactics that often help the symptoms," says Borowitz, a professor of paediatric gastroenterology at the University of Virginia. "But they want their kids to have the pills they've seen on TV."

Borowitz and other experts worry about the safety of using potent adult drugs to ease common childhood ailments. But their warnings are unlikely to be heeded by most doctors and parents - thanks, in large part, to an aggressive marketing campaign by pharmaceutical companies.

Nearly a quarter million children took Prilosec in 2000, according to U.S. Food and Drug Administration documents, and nearly 100,000 were prescribed similar "proton pump inhibitor" (PPI) heartburn drugs such as Prevacid, Nexium, Protonix, and Aciphex. None of these PPIs were approved for pediatric use at the time...