Should DayQuil Be Legal? • Hacker News Board

Re: Should DayQuil Be Legal?

#81

Post by mannanj » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 5:35 PM UTC

bityard wrote: post #39

I just can't get super upset about this. Sure, OTC companies are duping customers with marketing, but what's new about that? As the person holding the money, it's my job to look at what is effective and what the active ingredients are in any given product. Or ask my doctor/nurse/pharmacist what to do, if I can't be bothered to make the effort myself. When I want to get irrationally angry about something in a departme…

> As the person holding the money, it's my job to look at what is effective and what the act ingredients are in any given product.

I wish the industry, our health organizations, and most people in general acted as though this were true.

The environment we live in in general is increasingly hostile to people who ask those questions, do their own research, and take responsibility for their health in this way. I have first hand experience having reversed chronic health conditions myself by doing my own research. What have and do others say about it? Everything: every person on the sidelines watching who have formed opinions about how things are supposed to be, and how doctors and nurses and pharmacists are supposed to know better, attack and ridicule me and others like me and when we "look at what is effective and what the active ingredients are" we are gaslit and told we can't possible understand and know that and to leave it to the experts. Of course the definition of expert is only ever tribal and is a moving trojan horse for whatever best allows the agenda of an industry to establish its control over you.

Re: Should DayQuil Be Legal?

#82

Post by ryandrake » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 5:36 PM UTC

mindslight wrote: post #52

ryandrake wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making the active ingredients prominent is a good start but not sufficient. As the article points out, the word "phenylephrine" looks/sounds similar enough to "pseudoephedrine" to broadly fool the population.

That's why I said "diminish greatly" rather than solve - by doing something basically everybody should be able to agree on regardless if you think a given product should be on the market or not. They should probably have to split up large words with dashes or even spaces "phenyl-ephrine" "psuedo-ephedrine". Maybe even "phenyl-eph-rine" "psuedo-eph-edrine". One authoritative list published by the FDA (they already kee…

It just seems like a quick patch that doesn't acknowledge or address the root cause: that the FDA is supposed to be regulating both safety and effectiveness, but it is largely abdicating the "effectiveness" role over to companies' marketing departments. If corporate marketing can convince the public that the serpensoleum drug works, then that's enough to put it in a shiny box in the drug store.

Re: Should DayQuil Be Legal?

#83

Post by eli » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 5:37 PM UTC

vlovich123 wrote: post #40

Aurornis wrote: post #35

This article uses the trick where you pick studies that support your argument and ignore all of the studies that disagree with it. There are other studies where Dextromethorphan improves both objective and subjective measures of coughing: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37232330/ They also picked a study that shows honey outperforming Dextromethorphan but ignored all the studies that show honey performing similarly o…

> There are so many studies and papers published now that you can find both positive and negative results for just about anything. Doesn’t that suggest that the effect overall is neutral?

No, you can't just "average" different studies and I'm not sure what "neutral" means in the context of some studies showing a benefit and others not showing a benefit.

Re: Should DayQuil Be Legal?

#84

Post by iamnothere » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 5:37 PM UTC

ikesau wrote: post #22

the_sleaze_ wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went to a southeast asian country and got a staph infection. I walked down to the pharmacy, asked the pharmastst for a topical and an oral antibiotic. 3 days later i was healed, continued the course the rest of the week and that was it. $12 dollars american. I got another staph infection previously in the united states. Needed to go to a doc in the box who misdiagnosed it. A few days went by and i needed to go to a…

I'm sorry that happened to you. Sincerely. That sounds incredibly frustrating, painful, and scary. I think your maximalist conclusion of "drugs should be legalized" might have some second-order effects that might be net worse for society, though. Addiction, misuse, MRSA, overdoses, etc.

How do you contrast this stance with say, Vietnam, where drug prescriptions are not required? Is their society collapsing?

It’s almost like there are other factors at play, and our system is an inadequate band-aid on those issues that has its own side effects.

Re: Should DayQuil Be Legal?

#85

Post by nekusar » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 5:40 PM UTC

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #27

bigfishrunning wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the reasons doxycyclene is so effective is because it's less overprescribed. Antibiotic resistance is a real thing, and the day we run out of viable ones is going to be ugly. Having a gatekeeper isn't a bad idea.

To add to this, despite all efforts to educate people, many STILL don't know that antibiotics don't work against viruses and will want one when dealing with a cold or other viral infection. If we let antibiotics be over-the-counter, every damn infectious bacteria will be a super-strain in a year.

Antibiotics are routinely given to all of their farm animals as part of their food, for prophylaxis. But allowing humans to buy when they're sick is somehow the super-strain-end-of-times??

Antibiotics stop bacteria. Antivirals stop viruses.

Except bacteria can be attacked whenever, the sooner the better.

Antivirals need a rapid and early timeframe to work. Getting a fucking doctor to say yes is almost always too long, and you missed your treatment window. That is unless you go the ER, and lucky to not get shoved aside. Then pay $$$$$

Re: Should DayQuil Be Legal?

#86

Post by thallavajhula » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 5:46 PM UTC

I use DayQuil/NyQuil when I get a cold and in my case, it's always worked well. It suppresses the symptoms and lets me carry on with my day-to-day. I did try once going 1 week without it and it was hell.

Re: Should DayQuil Be Legal?

#87

Post by kube-system » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 5:47 PM UTC

rustcleaner wrote: post #62

jmalicki wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Acetaminophen (Tylenol) is probably the OTC drug that is at the top of the list to be made RX-only due to its dangers.

Please no. We need to be going the other way on that trend: converting things which won't easily outright kill/maim you (and dare I say, even potentially addictive ones) at normal doses from Rx to OTC! Acetaminophen is one of the few cheap, easy, and working products on the shelf!

A concern with OTC drugs is specifically that they won't be taken at normal doses. People confuse brand names and drug names, and don't realize they are taking more than the reccomended amount. This is especially problematic with combination drugs.

Re: Should DayQuil Be Legal?

#88

Post by kube-system » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 5:51 PM UTC

I think there's one thing most people agree on: drugs should be safe and effective.

DXM is fine but oral phenylephrine should be banned. The only reason it's in any of these drugs is because they don't want to lose sales when the real version that works is locked behind the pharmacy counter after hours. It's a scam to keep sales up.

Re: Should DayQuil Be Legal?

#89

Post by kube-system » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 5:55 PM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #53

bityard wrote: post #39

I just can't get super upset about this. Sure, OTC companies are duping customers with marketing, but what's new about that? As the person holding the money, it's my job to look at what is effective and what the active ingredients are in any given product. Or ask my doctor/nurse/pharmacist what to do, if I can't be bothered to make the effort myself. When I want to get irrationally angry about something in a departme…

The reason to take this seriously is mentioned in the article: It is possible to OD on Tylenol, and when consumers miss the fact that these drugs are all just Tylenol+junk, they might believe they need to take several of them together to get well. It's similar to the shampoo example (a huge selection of borderline useless products that make money purely because of marketing) but with a minor safety consideration, too…

Especially when the phenylephrine they took doesn't fix the problems the box promised to fix.

Re: Should DayQuil Be Legal?

#90

Post by kube-system » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 5:58 PM UTC

bityard wrote: post #39

I just can't get super upset about this. Sure, OTC companies are duping customers with marketing, but what's new about that? As the person holding the money, it's my job to look at what is effective and what the active ingredients are in any given product. Or ask my doctor/nurse/pharmacist what to do, if I can't be bothered to make the effort myself. When I want to get irrationally angry about something in a departme…

> When I want to get irrationally angry about something in a department store, I'll walk over to the shampoos, which for some reason always have a whole entire aisle dedicated to a single product, when they all do literally the same exact thing, just with different scents and advertising budgets baked into the sticker price.

Somewhere on a shampoo forum people are complaining that all computers do the same damn thing. I guess they probably just don't know what they're talking about.