Cold Medicine Technology

Cold medicines have come a long way since I was a kid and used take Contact whenever I had a cold This was back in the day before tamper resistant packaging and worries about poisoning. Contact came in a capsule that was clear on one have and you could see little round balls inside it. I never took one apart but they looked like they would be fairly easy to jimmy open.

This all changed when some schmuck started poisoning Tylenol capsules with cyanide in Chicago back in the early 80s. Before anyone caught on, after the funeral of one of the victims, two family members died from taking Tylenol from the same bottle. After that all over the counter medicines started having tamper proof packaging and designs. No one would buy them otherwise.

Anyway thats not what I wanted to talk about today. What I want to talk about today is the wonderful advances that have been made in cold medicine. In particular the medicine I'm taking now which time released and is made up of 600mg of Guaifenesin (expectorant) and 60mg of Psuedoephedrine (decongestant.) For someone who has really suffered from chest colds that go into Bronchitis or Pneumonia this has been a great advance. Breathing and not having a stopped up nose and lungs is a great thing.

I first found out about combos like this last year when a doctor put me on Psuedovent 400 (120mg Psuedoephedrine and 400mg Guaifenesesin.) I felt better almost immediately after I started taking it. When I got my current cold I still had a few left from last year but worried about when I ran out and still had my cold. But luckily there was an over the counter formulation available.