Summary
The FDA has proposed phasing out oral phenylephrine, a common decongestant in cold medicines like Sudafed and DayQuil, after studies showed it is no more effective than a placebo.
The drug, ineffective when swallowed due to breakdown in the stomach, remains usable in nasal sprays.
Alternatives include pseudoephedrine, nasal sprays, and steroid treatments like Flonase.
The regulatory process to remove phenylephrine could take over a year, but experts argue removing ineffective options will help consumers choose better remedies for congestion. Drugmakers are expected to challenge the proposal.
Pseudoephedrine. In the US, you have to go to the pharmacy counter and ask for it, but it works.
And it works great! I woke up with a ton of sinus pain yesterday. My whole face ached. Two pseudoephedrine and it was gone in an hour.
The problem is that it is legally an evil drug because you can make meth from it, so it remains heavily restricted. There are more effective ways to make meth at commercial scale than by buying and crushing up cold and flu tablets, but it’s a question of moral principle, i.e. not condoning evil.
This is some dumb pearl clutching bullshit.
With this asinine logic, buying apples are condoning evil because their seeds contain cyanide and though there are more effective ways to create cyanide at commercial scale than buying apples and extracting the small amount of cyanide from the seeds it’s still a question of moral principle i.e not condoning evil.
Yeah, but people are actually making meth from pseudoephedrine and no one is making cyanide from apples.
And yes, I hate having to go inside to buy it as I use it nearly every day.
You use cyanide every day?
Usually in combination with happiness.
Unless it’s the depression week.
They spend more money and chemistry making pseudoephedrine hard to make into meth then they do on the everything else in the medicine. It’s also why meth labs tend to blow up when they didn’t with with standard pseudoephedrine.
phenylephrine is effective as a nasal spray, not in tablet or liquid (i.e. taken orally).
drug makers were all in a panic over lost sales due to pseudoephedrine getting put behind the counter. they basically lied to everyone about phenylephrine’s effectiveness when they put it in all the stuff sold on retail shelves just to protect their fucking profits.
The stuff that they restricted.
Drugmakers are expected to challenge the proposal.
But has anyone thought about the corporations?
Yeah, that one guy did.
Just stay home when you are sick. being miserable in bed stops the spread.
Drixoral!
This stuff is a miracle here in the UK:
First time I tried the Micromist nasal spray I was 100% blocked up and had no expectations of it working. After a couple of minutes my nose was completely unblocked.
I still use it now and then as my nostrils alternate being blocked and some days I just can’t put up with it or struggle to sleep. But you have to take long breaks from using it as you get “blowback” where symptoms come back hard if you use it for too long and then stop.
There’s another ingredient in Sudafed that does a pretty damn good job of unblocking your nose, let me tell you
