One additional data point that might help explain it too.
I’m a redhead.
I adapt ridiculously fast to anything that is anasthetic or numbing. Novacaine? If the dentist needs topical the first area has worn off before they’re done. Second time I had general I was fine in minutes. I preferred to walk out because the wheel chair wasn’t meant for someone my size, but still wasn’t allowed.
Phenylephrine, I learned long ago, makes me want to jump out of my skin, and does nothing else for me. I enjoy experimenting with all kinds of drugs and have had some “bummers” and OTC “decongestants” like phenylephrine are definitely on my bummer list. When I saw a cousin I hadn’t talked to in a long time, somehow it came up: she said anything with phenylephrine made her feel insane, and I suspect it’s a genetic thing.
I have to be cautious about ANY drug that emphasizes its anti-inflammatory actions, and that includes too high a dose of prednisone for asthma, or even a 500 mg pill of Naproxen. I wonder how many others are similarly affected?
It’s easy for me to imagine how nasty side effects of $billion OTC drugs would be underreported, unless lotsa deaths ensued from their use.
Didn’t they switch from pseudoephedrine because of the claim that kitchen chemists were turning out minute amounts of street drugs (meth) by converting cold remedies?
How’s that working for them?
If I take the smallest dose of OTC Benadryl/diphenhydramine, I quickly get enormously drowsy and the the next day I feel like my head is stuffed with cotton. To understate, I’m not at my best.
This drug makes a ton of money and I once read that the reason it’s so popular is people use it for insomnia, and not for symptoms of a cold. Indeed, I was once scheduled for surgery and told my doctor, “How am I going to sleep the night before this?” and she prescribed me an antihistamine analog to diphenhydramine. Worked like a charm.
i think that’s not a thing?
Most of what is known about drug expiration dates comes from a study conducted by the Food and Drug Administration at the request of the military. With a large and expensive stockpile of drugs, the military faced tossing out and replacing its drugs every few years. What they found from the study is 90% of more than 100 drugs, both prescription and over-the-counter, were perfectly good to use even 15 years after the expiration date
I swore off Sudafed, Actifed et al 30 years ago. I bought a package of tablets because my hay fever was really bugging me. I became confused and really, really, incredibly iritable. Not the preferred mindset for my work. I wanted to kill anyone that interrupted or bothered me, and I was known as the calm guy that was always sent out to jobsites to settle upset clients down.
It’s the only time I’ve thrown a medication into the garbage after a single dose.
I’ve been an Advil Cold & Sinus devotee for awhile. It always seems to work for me. I used to take Sudafed, but it was so long ago I don’t know if it was the same formula.
I take one at night to help me get a little drowsy.
I’ve assumed a lot of “cold meds” are soporifics, and it’s the enforced nap that makes people feel better. Better in a week with treatment, or seven days without.
This is Sudafed PE not Sudafed.
The one they brought out to have a product you couldn’t make meth out of.
This is a very misleading title. The issue is only with medications that use phenylephrine as a decongestant. None of the medicines named (as named) contain phenylephrine, although there are variations (with different names), that do. In most cases, these include the initials PE.
In my opinion, the biggest error here (and the cause of much confusion) is that Sudafed uses pseudoephedrine, and is VERY effective. Once that was put behind the counters (due to use in meth labs), they released Sudafed PE (that PE is the key) that uses phenylephrine instead of pseudoephedrine. Anyone that has tried Sudafed PE can tell you that it doesn’t work.
Also, the main ingredient in Benadryl is the antihistamine diphenhydramine. The main ingredients in Nyquil are acetaminophen (aka Tylenol), dextromethorphan (a cough suppressant) and doxylamine succinate (an antihistamine). The main ingredient in Sudafed is Pseudoephedrine. The main ingredient in Mucinex is guaifenesin (an expectorant).
Phenylephrine is not the main ingredient in any medicine except Sudafed PE (and generic equivalents).
Lots of people react to lots of different medicines in different ways. That’s why the cautions and warnings always say things like “may cause…”. In my case, Benadryl doesn’t make me sleepy. It turns me into a zombie. I get extremely fuzzy headed, I suppose I do get drowsy, but I cannot sleep. I can’t do anything. I can’t read. I can’t watch tv. It just makes me feel like shit and like I’m not even alive anymore. And when it wears off, I feel like I have a hangover. Now, that’s if I take the whole pill. If I cut it in half, then it works like fucking magic, clears up my runny nose or whatever allergic reaction I’m having, and I don’t get sleepy or fuzzy headed and I have no after effects. Claritin, which is supposed to be the non-drowsy antihistamine, works the exact same way on me. The whole pill just screws me up for 12 hours. But half a pill works perfectly. I rarely take either, though. I usually just deal with the runny nose. It’s not worth the risk of the enzombification.
I get that from Zyrtec, which is supposed to be non-drowsy. Granted it doesn’t say anything about non-stupefying. Count me among those who doesn’t really notice 1 or 2 Benadryls. I take Claritin a lot during allergy season, but right now I take Allegra. (I had one doctor who said switch it up once in a while so as not to develop a tolerance - which IIRC was the basis for some class-action lawsuit against an antihistamine manufacturer, and this is why the drug was ineffective.)
Oh yeah, I can’t find the quote now but I believe Brian Eno once suggested, “there are no side effects; there are only effects.”
That’s how Hibernol works.
Avoid using antihistamines if you’re getting sick. Look up why. But for allergies: You used to be able to get not pseudoephedrine but /real/ ephedrine in the old kind of Primatene pills. If you had intolerably bad allergy symptoms, including of course /struggling to breathe at all/, you could take half a Primatene pill and fifteen or twenty minutes later you were fine for the rest of the night. Also you could get natural Chinese ephedra in a little bundle of sticks in any health food store. Boil a few sticks in a cup of water, drink the resulting tea, and that solved it. The feeling was nervous and a bit uncomfortable, but when I was exhausted just trying to breathe enough to stay alive, the nervousness was easily overwhelmed by relief and I could sleep. I moved away from a neighborhood plagued with Scotch broom and have had hardly any bad allergy times since then, though I have also learned to avoid fireworks, cigaret smokers and gray-dry redwood sawdust. Also plywood sawdust. If you’re having a hard time with allergies, like on a windy day, wear a covid mask. If your eyes are itchy, don’t rub them, but tilt your head back and wash them with Equate brand sterile saline solution, at $3 for a 12-oz bottle. Keep one in the fridge and one in the car.
Because of the way evolution cobbles together dodgy solutions that provide minor gradual improvements, almost every chemical our bodies produce has effects on multiple systems. (Insulin is a rare exception in that it seems to have just one purpose.) So if we take medication that increases or reduces the amount of some chemical in our body, that affects more than one system. That’s why side-effects happen.
I think “side effect” is a useful term, but it is relative. Someone might be prescribed a drug to do A, with B being a possible side-effect. Someone else might be give the same drug to do B, and A is a side-effect. The ideal drug would have only one effect, but given that our bodies reuse a single chemical in many systems, that’s a pretty big ask.
As my doctor once cheerfully told me: “As you get older, more things break, and we give you a new drug for each thing that breaks, and eventually you reach a point where can’t find a drug to fix a new problem without nullifying some drug that fixes an earlier problem, and then you die. But hey, you still live a lot longer than you would have if none of those drugs had been prescribed.”
This! It been clear to almost any decongestant user that phenylephrine is totally ineffective. As far as I can see, when pseudoephedrine was “locked up”, the pharm companies panicked and needed something that would be sold as a decongestant from the shelves. Either they misled the FDA or the FDA looked the other way to allow phenylephrine to be used.
This is the kind of crap, along with things like the opioid shenanigans, that makes it clear that the FDA is in the pharm companies’ pockets. It generally takes a genuine crisis, like with the opioids, to expose this. I actually surprised that the phenylephrine ineffectiveness has come to anything.
Huh, I had read that some drugs were vulnerable to expiring (and even potentially becoming dangerous, given enough time), but it’s probably a much, much smaller number than I assumed. Though the decongestants are likely more than 15 years old… (and I suspect I’ve got some aspirin somewhere that’s so old it’s broken down into its constituent chemical parts.)
And marketing dependent.
See the blood pressure medication that grows hair. (Rogaine)
Or the blood pressure medication that causes erections. (Viagra)
