A couple weeks ago on New Year’s Eve, my mom had to run a couple of errands, and I asked her if she can pick me up some allergy meds whilst she was out.
My nose was itchy and stuffy and I was having bad sinus headaches.
When she came home about an hour later, she gave me a bottle of allergy meds and she told me “I looked in two different stores, but they don’t make over the counter allergy meds for a stuffy nose. At least, all the allerg meds i could find were for runny nose.”
And I just find that weird. Because my nose wasn’t runny. It was stuffed to the point I could hardly breathe through it properly. But apparently cold and flu meds are for stuffy noses
Why don’t they make OTC allergy meds like Claritin or Allegra-D for stuffy noses?
Does the cause of the stuffy nose matter? You want to make the swelling go down, regardless of whether it’s allergies or a cold. It’s just treating a symptom so any decongestant should work, no?
But I dont have a cold.
It’s just allergies.
I don’t want to take cold meds for just allergies
If you are certain it’s just allergies, a claritin or reactin is OTC and generally effective.
All these people answering your question and you have some dumbass reason for not listening. Lmao, enjoy the stuff nose I guess.
No, exactly, you want a thing that makes the swelling go down. That’s a decongestant. Decongestants do nothing about the underlying cause. It’s just most commonly used when people also have a cold.
Meaning that it’s just marketed as cold medication without doing anything specifically for colds?
I mean, how do you treat a cold? Anything you do is treating symptoms and waiting for your body to get rid of germs.
I’ve always just done lots of water and waited it out. I see medication at the pharmacies labeled “cold medication”, but I never looked into what they do.
That’s perfectly fine. It’s not even really proven that additional water intake does anything at all. However, it usually makes you feel better which is why doctors recommend it and you should kep doing it. It’s ultimately treating a symptom, the miserable feeling.
The term “cold medication” is basically short for “take these things if you experience the symptoms commonly associated with the common cold”. There’s a reason why the question whether humans have “found a cure for the common cold” is a science-fiction thing - we can’t “cure” it. But a cold is (in most cases) so very harmless that it’s just not worth the effort to do more than treat symptoms. Most bodies are able to deal with the underlying causes just fine on their own if you just take a couple of days of rest to let yours to its thing.
But I don’t want a cold med.
I want an allergy med
It’s the same thing, you’re getting caught up on a meaningless distinction.
Maybe to you it’s meaningless but it isnt to me
I’m telling you it’s medically meaningless. Decongestants are decongestants. They aren’t ‘cold’ medicines or ‘allergy’ medicines. They act on inflammation in the nose and reduce congestion. How it’s advertised doesn’t make a bit of difference to what the medicine does.
I still just want an otc allergy med that treats stuffy nose.
I dont want a cold medicine
It’s not a subjective thing. Cold medicines treat symptoms, not the disease. Cold and allergies have common symptoms.
If your concern is that cold medicines don’t work for your allergies, thwn those tend not to work for colds either.
If the medicine is trying to use phenylephrine in a pill, that doesn’t do anything. You might also want to skip the acetaminophen usually included and you have zero need for that, but not every co of d medicine has that.
But I don’t want a cold medicine, I just want an allergy medicine that treats stuff nose!
Cold medicines don’t treat colds, they treat cold symptoms, many of which are the same as allergy symptoms.
Can’t help you with that.