I’ve had a mild cough for the past couple of days, something that my recently discovered homeopathic remedy Airborne didn’t kick.
I looked through the medicine cabinet at home and found surprisingly little in the way of remedies. Berta has been on a frenzy of throwing out over-the-counter drugs that even look like they’re expired. I have to hide bottles of ibuprofen just to keep them around when I need them. I figured I could probably do without any cough medicine, but finally on Wednesday I was done being bothered by it.
On the way home from work I stopped at Eckerd (Doesn’t everyone else like the name “Thrift Drug” better than “Eckerd”? What were they thinking?) to look through their drug selection.
One of the things I like to do when I’m shopping for drugs is to compare the drug contents of the various pills. It’s amazing how much the drug store is a marketing paradise.
For example, in Electronics Botique (Whoa- did I break your brain with that topic break?) different game producers fight for positioning on the high-value retail shelves. Producing a video game is a feat, no doubt, and getting it to sit on the shelves at ElBo is downright Olympic. But then you look at the drug store shelves.
Tylenol must make 30 different “kinds” of Tylenol. And they all contain the same ingredients. Does changing the color of the box make it better? I guess there is some different between the “Extra Strength” version and the… Wait… Where’s the “Regular Strength” version?
But here they have a box for Tylenol for back pain, and Tylenol for Headaches, and Tylenol for Migraines. They all have the same thing in them! Different dye in the pill shell? Very weird. And nevermind that the generic brand has the exact same stuff and is always cheaper. Cold and Cough drugs are the same with with a few exceptions and additional oddities.
For example, it seems that they’ve gotten lazy about producing separate cold and cough medicines. They assume that because you’re coughing, you must also have a blocked nose. I don’t have a blocked nose. Nonetheless, there is no “cough” medicine without the “cold” medicine also in it. Why?
Alka-Seltzer, my preferred delivery method, seems to have an odd monopoly on the effervescent cold market. Why doesn’t anyone else produce fizzy drugs? Fizzy drugs rock!
And here’s my million-dollar question: Sometimes I just want to take a drug to reduce my symptoms enough so that I can rest and heal myself. Where have all the drugs gone that were available when I was a kid that would knock you on your butt for two days?
No. Today, it’s all “non-drowsy”. Bah! I want “This will put you into a deep sleep until you’ve made up the rest that you didn’t get because you were hacking all last night.” Does NyQuil even do it any more? I think they expect me to sleep normally just because my symptoms are reduced. And what exactly is the point of DayQuil? The whole reason I wanted the NyQuil is to knock me out!
Well, I grabbed some Cough and Cold Alka-Seltzer, and I could only stomach half a glass of it after dinner. It was just too flavored. So much for that.
Cough. Hack.
