It's a Dad's Life: Just when we get over Mia's latest bout of teething and are appreciating a few consecutive nights' sleep, Nell starts foaming at the mouth and babbling deliriously in her sleep. Her temperature shoots up to about 103 degrees and we're on patrol again.

I may sound blase about this, but that's only because I am. We have had a couple of feverish episodes with our eldest daughter in the last few years and she has always pulled through with the greatest of ease. Her temperature tends to skyrocket alarmingly fast when she's ill, so we treat it quickly to get it down and keep an eye on her to ensure she's stable.

She was hospitalised once as an infant due to a febrile convulsion and, while the experience was quite terrifying at the time, it taught us to remain calm and deal with the situation.

The debate between me and the missus is over how we treat her.

I am treading on thin ice because the issue of health is one that has been the source of much disagreement. All my life, when I had a pain I took a tablet. If I had an infection I took an antibiotic.

I have been asthmatic since childhood, a lot of which was spent wheezing down handfuls of pills and sucking on an inhaler. I swallowed the medicine and the medical word whole.

Things have changed in the last 10 years to the point where I will only self-medicate if I feel it's absolutely necessary.

The missus, on the other hand, makes me look like the combined cast of Trainspotting on a New Year's Eve bender, she is so pure of body. She would have to be flayed and burned alive before allowing aspirin to ease her suffering.

Instead, I hear the homeopathy party line with regularity and the medical world denounced as satanic charlatans out for pharmaceutical world domination.

To be honest that wouldn't surprise me, but the fact remains, when the kids are sick we have to treat them. A lot of the time they can't tell us what's wrong, and sometimes homeopathic remedies (which as far as I can see are miniature balls of sugar) only get us so far. Occasionally I have reached for the dreaded Calpol.

The missus has stood unhappily by as I relinquish my personal power to the pharma-god and pour a spoonful down a coughing throat. Often this is followed by us getting to sleep for a couple of hours, but am I thanked? Never.

I am caught between a sense of moral virtue and a need for an easy life. I don't swallow the line that we should cure everything with a pill, and at the same time I don't think we should suffer unnecessarily so we can overcome every ill naturally. We have had serious arguments in our house over this and unfortunately these rows occur when we are both fraught over the kids' well-being, when we should be pulling together rather than nearly coming to blows.

Most of the time the homeopathic approach works wonders, but then there are the times a chemical boost is necessary. The whole issue of health and treatment is a thorny one in my experience. I see the dilemmas being repeated in the lives of my friends and extended family.

We all try to do our best by our kids and any insinuation that the approach we are taking is not in their best interests, we inevitably take as an attack on our parenting skills.

It has got to the point in some cases where people would rather openly discuss their pay packets, personal religious beliefs and political stances than whether they have opted to vaccinate or not.