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?
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.
If that were the case, then there should just be allergy meds that treat stuffy nose then
If someone is yelling for help because they’re bleeding out, do you first ask them whether they were cut or stabbed or shot and based on their response choose what to do? I’d hope you’d skip that part and simply stop the symptom, the bleeding.
…I don’t see how that’s comparable to this at all
If someone is bleeding, it doesn’t matter if the bleeding is coming from a cut, a stab wound, or a hole made by a bullet. You stop the bleeding. THEN, afterwards, when the bleeding is stopped, you can think about the underlying cause and whether you need to do anything about that (like sew up the wound, look for the bullet etc).
If someone has a stuffy nose, it doesn’t matter if the swelling is caused by a cold or the flu or allergies. You stop the swelling. THEN, afterwards, when the swelling is going down and the person can breathe again, you think about the underlying cause and whether you need to do anything about it (like antihistamines, antibiotics).
Do you see the parallel?
No, cause what does swelling have to do with any of this‽
Your nose is “stuffy” because the mucous membranes in your nose are swollen. A decongestant causes that swelling to go down.