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Best pills for runny nose

It’s cold and flu season. How do you turn off the faucet?

Not with today’s over the counter flu and cold products. Their decongestant ingredient, phenylephrine, doesn’t work (see story here), and the FDA plans to pull those products off the market (see story here).

Then what? Where will consumers turn for sinus relief?

Products with pseudoephredrine, such as the pre-2005 Contac pills, work and you can still get them without a prescription. But you have to ask a pharmacist, show ID and sign for it, and it’s rationed.

Why? Because that ingredient is easily converted into methamphetamine, so people scooped cold pills off drugstore shelves to make illicit drugs, and the government responded by restricting access to it (details here).

But if phenylephrine is taken off the market, what will flu and cold sufferers do? Well, what’s the point of buying something that doesn’t work? Really, nothing is changing. You have to ask the pharmacist for the good stuff.

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