They do - oxymetolazine/afrin nasal spray. Just don’t use it for more than 2 days as it causes rebound congestion. Pseudoephedrine in allegra/claritin d or in sudafed would also help. Pseudoephedrine is OTC but always behind the counter and has to be requested because people make meth from it. Phenylephrin has been shown not to work - avoid. Avoid in evening as it’ll keep you awake. If you really need to clear out use a nasal saline spray or neti pot.
In a fan of neti pot, despite how weird it feels, but be sure to read up on proper use (salt and sterile water!)
I hate nasal sprays though
Pseudoephedrine with acetometafin? Or just alone? I can get the mixture off the shelf.
Does the cause of the stuffy nose matter? You want to make the swelling go down, regardless of whether it's allergies or a cold. It's just treating a symptom so any decongestant should work, no?
But I dont have a cold.
It's just allergies.
I don't want to take cold meds for just allergies
No, exactly, you want a thing that makes the swelling go down. That's a decongestant. Decongestants do nothing about the underlying cause. It's just most commonly used when people also have a cold.
Meaning that it's just marketed as cold medication without doing anything specifically for colds?
I mean, how do you treat a cold? Anything you do is treating symptoms and waiting for your body to get rid of germs.
I've always just done lots of water and waited it out. I see medication at the pharmacies labeled "cold medication", but I never looked into what they do.
That's perfectly fine. It's not even really proven that additional water intake does anything at all. However, it usually makes you feel better which is why doctors recommend it and you should kep doing it. It's ultimately treating a symptom, the miserable feeling.
The term "cold medication" is basically short for "take these things if you experience the symptoms commonly associated with the common cold". There's a reason why the question whether humans have "found a cure for the common cold" is a science-fiction thing - we can't "cure" it. But a cold is (in most cases) so very harmless that it's just not worth the effort to do more than treat symptoms. Most bodies are able to deal with the underlying causes just fine on their own if you just take a couple of days of rest to let yours to its thing.
But I don't want a cold med.
I want an allergy med
It's the same thing, you're getting caught up on a meaningless distinction.
Maybe to you it's meaningless but it isnt to me
I'm telling you it's medically meaningless. Decongestants are decongestants. They aren't 'cold' medicines or 'allergy' medicines. They act on inflammation in the nose and reduce congestion. How it's advertised doesn't make a bit of difference to what the medicine does.
I still just want an otc allergy med that treats stuffy nose.
I dont want a cold medicine
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.
Then you should have just said that!
JFC literally everyone has been saying cold medicine treats these symptoms and you just reply with "I don't want cold medicine". You've been given the answer. Cold medicine treats the same symptoms as your allergy. Just call it allergy medicine to yourself or something
But I don't wanna take a cold medicine, I don't have a cold! It's just allergies, so I should just take an allergy med!!
The cold medicine is only called cold medicine because it treats symptoms from a cold. Which are similar if not the same as allergies.
You need antihistamines and decongestants to treat your allergy symptoms.
If a medicine has either of those, it can help you even if it's called Benadryl, Claritin or Advil.
Benadryl doesn't work for me anymore though.
Stopped working almost 6 years ago when I was 16
That's not the point. Just look for the medicinal ingredients that provide relief for your symptoms. It could be called cacapoopoo cold medicine, or super crazy allergy medicine #1 as long as it has the ingredients to treat the specific symptoms
But I dont wanna take a cold medication for allergies
I wanna take an allergy med for allergies
At this point you have to be trolling or incredibly neurodivergent and unable to look past the word cold on a box. The latter is understandable. I'd suggest researching which specific ingredients may help allergies and why it might be included in other/similar medication. Consult a doctor if needed.
Girl. The very first thing I said included "you want the swelling to go down". You didn't seem to mind. If you don't want help, don't ask for it.
whatevs 🙄😒
Can't help you with that.
If you are certain it's just allergies, a claritin or reactin is OTC and generally effective.
All these people answering your question and you have some dumbass reason for not listening. Lmao, enjoy the stuff nose I guess.
Whatevs 🙄 😒
I agree with the consensus here- you are thinking about this wrong. Allegra-D, the one behind the counter in my state, is an allergy medicine we use for colds, because it works better than anything labeled as cold medicine.
If you are saying you want something that treats allergies, and by treating them unstuffs your nose, that Allegra-D will work. I don't understand why you think it won't. The pseudoephedrine in it (the D in the name) is a vasoconstrictor that will open your nose.
If it's the same drug labeled as a cold medicine, it would work exactly the same.
I don't think im thinking about this wrong at all
They should just make ALLERGY MEDS that treat stuffy nose.
That is literally what Allegra D is.
Allegra d stopped working on me
Same with benadryl.
That's why I dont take either
I've got pretty bad allergies and have found that Fexofenadine works the best.
If you live in the place that abides by brand names only I can't help you with a product name
Fexofenadine is also by far the best I've used for my allergies. I have no side effects from them, no sleepiness and they work in 20 min. I use the 120mg variant.
It's great! Often I get so bunged up I can't sleep properly but I don't want to take DPH to act as an antihistamine and also knock me out
Cetirizine is great too, but it causes pretty bad drowsiness.
Air filtration? Lookup Corsi-Rosenthal box. It's an air cleaner you can make from a box fan and 4 furnace filters.
Drop some Tabasco sauce in a hot skillet. Clear your sinuses right up. Can’t guarantee you’ll like it, though.
When I was a kid, I had a nebulizer. Put some Pepsi in it. That was neat. Then I tried Tabasco. Why? I dunno. Love it on everything so I guess I thought it would be fun? Basically maced myself. Cleared me right up though!
I’m joking. Don’t do this. But technically… I mean you can get Tabasco sauce over the counter.
This was a weird way to do it, but I can sympathize. I have on occasion, overzealously eaten chicken wings with tons of way hotter than tabasco sauce then accidentally coughed with a mouthful of and getting a sinus cavity full of partially chewed chicken and hotter than hell hotsauce.
After clearing the chicken out, my sinuses were indeed clear, though the tears from the pain made me ungrateful.
I mean, I do like Tabasco.
Up there with Louisiana as my favorite brand of hot sauces
It's a good hot sauce.
But I really was joking — while nasal exposure to oleoresin capsicum will open your sinuses, it's no fun. I just joke about it, not because I want to fuck with people, but because I did it to myself when I was young and dumb and it's funny as hell.
You can try things like vics or nasal sprayers
Also putting your head over a warm kettle of water and breathing in the warm vapor helps
Other things would be nasal saltwater drains. Though make sure to use distilled water and not tapwater for example