Aired; December 11th, 2023.
There still is no cure for the common cold.
Last September – just before the cold and flu season typically starts — the Food and Drug Administration announced that oral phenylephrine, which is the active ingredient in several name-brand over the counter cold symptom remedies, isn’t effective. It came as a surprise to many who use some Sudafed, Mucinex and Dayquil products when they experience coughs, stuffed or runny noses or sore throats.
On The Spark Monday, Danielle Brigham, an Ambulatory Care Pharmacist, at UPMC Pinnacle Health Medical Group said the FDA announcement wasn’t a surprise to pharmacists, but pointed out it is one form of phenylephrine that was judged to be ineffective but the nasal form is effective,”We specifically are discussing the oral formulation not being effective. And so while patients may have been surprised, redirecting them to some other remedies that we do know to be effective, some of which are not even a medication, things like increasing fluids and things like that (to fight a cold).
Dr. Carrie Delone, Medical Director of Internal Medicine at UPMC, indicated multi-sympton cold remedies are popular because of the marketing,”When you look at multi-system symptom cold medications, they’re shotgunning every symptom they can think of — fever, chills, pain, body aches, cough, congestion, mucus, not being able to sleep. These are all of the things that bother you when you have a cold. The most effective part about them is their marketing, because the way they’re developed is that they put small doses of many ingredients into their cold medicines. They don’t have the same half life. So a half life is how much of that medication is cleared from your body. For how long does it take for half of the medication to be cleared from your body? So all of the the ingredients have different half lives. But they want you to take them every 12 hours. And they tend to put really low doses in there because that’s the safety profile they’re going for. So you you end up with very expensive, not very helpful cold medicines. And I’ve always counseled my patients, please don’t. Don’t go to CVS and pick the pretty box that says it’s going to get rid of every symptom because it can’t do that. Figure out what it is that’s bothering you the most. Is it congestion? Is it a cough? Is it fever? Is it pain? Is it that you can’t sleep and then really understand what you’re buying? If you can’t flip that box over and look at every single ingredient and understand what you’re getting, you shouldn’t even buy it.”
Dr. DeLone was asked the best way to fight a cold,”Rest and fluids. You can use a neti pot, you can use nasal sprays, hot tea and honey. Honey has been found to significantly help with coughs. One of my best friends when I have a cough is a water bottle. Just having sips of water when you’re coughing is really helpful. It’s something that, you know is uncomfortable. And a lot of times we don’t want to have a lot of congestion because nasal congestion can lead to sinus infections, ear infections. So there are reasons why you really don’t want to just say, well, just, suck it up and and put up with the pain because we really do want to keep your sinuses draining your tubes open because that can really cause significant issues if we if we don’t do that. So we do want something effective and there are medications, But again, there are many groups of people that can’t take them. So children under the age of six shouldn’t be taking over-the-counter medications — under four is the recommendation that you’ll see on the bottles that many pediatricians don’t want children under the age of six taking cold medications or if you’re pregnant, if you’re breastfeeding. And then there are a vast number of conditions. Heart disease and high blood pressure are all issues that you have to be careful when you have those conditions and you’re taking medication.”
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