CVS ditches common cold meds after FDA advisers say they’re useless | Bogus homeopathic products based on pseudoscience will remain on shelves.::Bogus homeopathic products based on pseudoscience will remain on shelves.
CVS ditches common cold meds after FDA advisers say they’re useless | Bogus homeopathic products based on pseudoscience will remain on shelves.::Bogus homeopathic products based on pseudoscience will remain on shelves.
No this is about phenylephrine, which is a vasoconstrictor. Allergy meds are a much different category, usually the pills are anti-histamines. The nasal sprays are usually a corticosteroid (there’s different ones too though). Anti-histamines can certainly have side effects though, especially the ones that don’t say non-drowsy, as anyone who’s taken benadryl could tell you. I’m glad they pulled phenylephrine. I personally noticed it seemed to have no effect, and use pseudophedrine whenever I feel like I want a decongestant.
An interesting thing about Benadryl (diphenhydramine): if you look at “PM” meds or things that are supposed to help with sleep, diphenhydramine is usually the active ingredient. Benadryl is a sleep medication that happens to also work as an antihistamine which I find a bit amusing.
Antihistamine drugs are all sleep medications. The non-drowsy versions just don’t cross the blood-brain barrier and cause less drowsiness.
The problem with using antihistamines as sleep meds is that you build a tolerance fairly quickly, so they work well for occasional use but not in the long-term.
That’s a good point and goes for pretty much any “insomnia” medication. None have good evidence for helping in the long term. The only intervention that has good evidence for chronic insomnia isn’t a medication, it’s cognitive behavioral therapy for sleep. Unfortunately that can be difficult and expensive to access, there’s not a ton of psychologists or counselors that do that.
Benadryl is an antihistamine that also makes you sleepy. You’ve got it entirely backwards.
Very true! Benadryl was primarily intended for use as an allergy medication, though it’s common for meds to get repurposed like this if they have other effects. Histamine in your brain is important for maintaining wakefulness. Non-drowsy allergy medications avoid this by making sure they can’t get past the blood brain barrier.
All those pm meds are just branding. Unless you’re also in pain or have a fever and too lazy to take two pills or something, there’s no real benefit. Just a glance at amazon shows the unit price of tylenol pm vs the same dose of generic benadryl (diphenhydramine) is 12x more! There’s multiple meds like this in the over the counter section, always read what the actual active ingredients are, not just the branding. I’m particularly annoyed by all the combination products that wrap tylenol/acetaminophen in them, or an NSAID (ibuprofen, naproxen), as it could be easy to accidentally overdose those if you were also taking them separately or a very similar med.