Midwest Chick's Place

It’s taken fourteen years for the FDA (which should be abolished, IMO) to figure out that not only does phenylephrine NOT work as a decongestant when taken orally, it may possibly be dangerous due to increased heart rates.  Other non-effective drugs are:

Guaifenesin as a cough medicine used to clear mucus from the airways.

Dextromethorphan as a cough suppressant for upper respiratory infections.

But, as they say, there’s more:

The FDA also found problems with the clinical trials conducted by drug manufacturers that initially claimed phenylephrine’s effectiveness.

“All of the studies (both positive and negative) were highly problematic in both design and methodology,” the reviewers wrote. “All used a highly variable endpoint (NAR) to study a drug in the setting of a highly variable disease state (the common cold) that is no longer used as a primary endpoint to evaluate congestion in pivotal trials.”

The reviewers said the multiple statistical and methodological flaws in the studies make them “unacceptable” as continued evidence for phenylephrine’s efficacy at recommended oral doses.

According to the FDA, the science has evolved since phenylephrine was first recommended as an oral decongestant. The clinical pharmacology of oral phenylephrine was not fully appreciated initially. This explains why the flawed original studies were once considered adequate to support a finding of efficacy and safety for 10-milligram doses taken orally every four hours.

Seriously.  If you could see me, you’d see my shocked face.

There’s a chance that these drugs will be pulled from the market because they probably will lose their ‘effective’ label (wonder why the covid shots aren’t given the same treatment?).

Anecdotally speaking, I already knew what they found.  I periodically go to the pharmacy, have my drivers license scanned, and sign a thing that says I’m not going to make meth out of my pseudoephedrine–it galls me to do so, but I have no choice.  

Because none of the other shit works for me.  At all.

And in the ‘what’s old is new again’ category, a pediatric doctor quoted in the article linked above says:

When children are sick, Dr. Nachman recommends parents take a common-sense approach to caring for them. That means focusing on providing fluids to prevent dehydration, giving analgesics to relieve discomfort, and allowing the illness to run its course. “Sometimes nothing can make your child recover faster except some time.”

I have no other words for this.