During this cold and flu season you'll have a lot of decisions to make when it comes to medicating yourself and your children. But there are medication mishaps you'll want to avoid.

If you leave your doctor's office without a prescription, your first stop before heading home may be the pharmacy.

But before you buy over the counter medications, you'll need to ask the right questions.

“You need to find out what each drug does, what it's for, how long to give it and what dose to give it,” said Lewis Drug Director of Pharmacy, Bill Ladwig.

And the same goes for prescriptions. Lewis Drug Director of Pharmacy Bill Ladwig says you should never make dosing a guessing game.

“You're dosing one bottle with the same dropper that you had before. So you may be giving twice the amount of medication using the same volume, but the concentration's different,” said Ladwig.

It's also important to finish all prescribed medication.

“It's easy to give a child an antibiotic when they're sick. They're on the couch, they're lying there, it's easy. But day 8, 9, 10 when they're out running around it's a lot more difficult to track them down but it's really important to finish the therapy,” Ladwig said.

Finishing the medicine, means you're winning the war going on inside your sick body.

“What's going on is the bacteria in the body are fighting against the white blood cells to kill the infection. Antibiotic helps in the process. But all of a sudden when you stop giving the antibiotic and the white blood cells can't compensate, and you start losing the war,” said Ladwig.

And Ladwig says, don't over medicate.

“I'm a huge advocate of only using single products. Don't use multiple drugs when one is needed,” Ladwig said.

So find out what every medication you have does to treat just the symptoms you have.