By Elizabeth Jardina, STAFF WRITER
AROVING COLD around the office has left you, roughly, feeling like crap.
So you head to the drug store to find a sticky-sweet liquid to soothe your ragged tonsils, your hacking cough, your feverish forehead — only to be faced with a million options.
Do you need the orange Triaminic or the Vicks NyQuil multisymptom? The $2 store brand or the name-brand $5 cough syrup? And if you’re feeling sick, are you doomed to have to drink a couple of spoonfuls of fake-cherry, nasty stuff?
There are two important considerations here: What will make you feel better, and what can you stand to swallow?
The medicine
You’ve read it before, you’ll read it again, but we’ve gotta write it one more time: Read the label. Of any medicine you take. Read the label and see what it does and how to take it.
Larry Alejandre, a pharmacist at Kaiser Oakland Medical Center, says consumers tend to pick familiar brands and don’t figure out what the medicines do.
“They’re basing their selections
on what they see on the TV, ads in
the magazines, and oftentimes they’re throwing their money down the
drain. They need to know what
they’re treating.”
Pick a formula that treats the symptoms you have. Don’t have a fever? You don’t need a medication that has a fever-reliever. Don’t have a cough? Don’t take a cough-suppressant.
Once you find the right medicine
for your symptoms, follow the directions on how to take it.
“People tend to think a little’s good, a lot’s better and that’s not often the case,” Alejandre says. “The amount they gain is not measurable. Theywon’t feel that much better than if they took the recommended amount.”
Dr. Peter Grossman, an internist in San Mateo, says cold medicines are not silver bullets. “They have some effect on some people,” he says cautiously. A doctor can prescribe a stronger medicine if your OTC one isn’t working.
Pay attention to how the drug makes you feel. In nighttime cold medicines (like NyQuil and Tylenol PM), the thing that makes many people sleep is some combination of alcohol and antihistamines, which for many people have sedative effects.
One tricky thing in buying cold medication this year is that cold medicines that contain the decongestant pseudoephedrine (best known as the active ingredient in Sudafed) have been largely moved behind pharmacy counters. You don’t need a prescription, but you do need to ask for them. Stores that don’t have pharmacies may not carry them at all.
This doesn’t have anything to do with the drug itself; it will clear up your stuffy nose beautifully. But it’s also an ingredient in making the illegal drug methamphetamine.
Alejandre warns that people with high blood pressure should avoid drugs with pseudoephedrine altogether because it can make hypertension worse.
People usually don’t think too much about how medicine tastes, but there actually are differences, our staff members discovered, after doing an unscientific taste test.
We tasted six cold medicines: three multisymptom syrups and three cough syrups. (Because these are drugs, afterall, we tasted only small amounts and spit them out after we’d sufficiently determined the merits — or demerits — of their flavors.)
Our conclusions weren’t that surprising but may dishearten the cheapskates among us: Name brands really did taste better than store brands. Even though the Target Cough Formula DM is $3.08 cheaper than the Robitussin DM, all of our tasters said they would fork over the extra three bucks so they wouldn’t have to grimace so much as the medicine went down.
Here’s what we found:
– Tylenol Cough & Sore Throat ($4.84 for 8 fluid ounces), contains acetaminophen for fever and sore throat, dextromethorphan to ease coughing and doxylamine succinate to clear sinuses: We plucked this product off the shelf — new for this year’s cold season — because of its flavor. Rather than being fruity and dark, it’s bright blue and minty. The tasters who enjoy mint flavors were enthusiastic about this multisymptom formula’s taste. Those who can’t drink their Listerine straight complained about a menthol sensation and too much mintiness. Recommended.
– Vick’s NyQuil Cough, cherry flavor, ($4.79 for 6 ounces), contains dextromethorphan for coughing and doxylamine succinate to clear sinuses: The granddaddy of cough syrup, tasters noted that this one didn’t taste that much like cough syrup. It wasn’t especially thick, the cherry flavor didn’t taste outrageously fake, and it had almost no aftertaste. Recommended.
– Walgreens’ Rest Easy NightTime, cherry flavor ($3.49 for 6 ounces), same ingredients as NyQuil: Not bad, but after tasting the real deal, this one tasted fake, thick and sweet. And it has a bad, bitter aftertaste.
– Robitussin DM ($5.14 for 4 ounces): The strictly cough- suppressant formulas, for some reason, didn’t taste as good as the NyQuil. But of these, the Robitussin was best. One taster conjectured that perhaps she was just used to the flavor of Robitussin and therefore didn’t mind it.
– Tasters were torn about which was worse: the Walgreens Wal- Tussin Cough ($4.99 for 4 ounces) or the Target Cough Formula DM ($2.09 for 4 ounces). Both were extremely bitter.
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