Skip to main content

Hippy Medicine

Among the other fallout from my recent Houston trip, I ended up with a pretty nasty sounding cough. I didn't feel sick, but I sounded pretty bad. In fact, I got through a fairly intense "bootcamp" class with that cough, so I figured I was fine (side note: the running joke seems to be that I had mono).

Still, I sounded sick. It got bad enough that I figured I'd use a sick day a couple of days after I got back to rest up. A day of rest is usually enough to help me recover from colds & coughs, so I figured I'd be back to the grind the next day. And since I was being all good about taking care of myself, I went looking for cough medicine, too. If I was actually trying to make myself get better, it couldn't hurt to actually try to make myself get better.

Now I haven't been sick enough to take medicine in a while, so I had to ask where the medicine was. My mom pulled out a box of the stuff, and then wandered off to deal with something else. The first thing I noticed was that I didn't recognize the brand. It had this green leaf for a logo, and the box was labeled with "Bronchial Wellness Remedy." I actually remember thinking, "well, that's odd, but so long as it helps, whatever."

Regardless, I started looking for the directions for how often you're supposed to take it & how much you're supposed to take each time. What that meant was that I had to scan all of the "this stuff is the bestest, honest" claims. Every brand of medicine has this in some way or another, so it didn't surprise me to see that there. What did surprise me, though, were all of the asterisks and footnotes. Footnotes? Why would there need to be multiple footnotes on cough medicine?

As it turns out, the footnotes were for things like, "the FDA hasn't approved this statement" or "this product shouldn't be used to diagnose or treat illness." Really? This stuff is super awesome, but I can't actually rely on it to make my cough better? Why the heck else would I take it? It wouldn't be for the taste, that's for sure. I think they were going for a honey flavor, but let's just say I like the generic cough syrup taste better.

So, to recap: logo that is trying to be all Mother Earth, some sort of "all natural" remedy, no FDA approval, and it's not actually medicine in the commonly agreed-upon sense. I was drinking hippy, tree-hugger medicine.

And drink it I did. Again, I figured it couldn't hurt. It wasn't likely to make me worse, so in the worst case, I'd just make a face twice a day when I took the stuff. In the best case, it'd actually help with the cough.

In hindsight, I can't be sure if it helped or not. It's not like the cough magically went away as soon as I started taking the medicine. On the flip side, the cough did slowly start to subside, so maybe it was just working its magic slowly. Either way, it was a fairly small bottle, so I've almost finished it by taking it twice it day for three days.

You know, maybe I'm crazy, but I think I'm going to opt for one of those red cough syrups next time.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

From Scratch 2

A few months ago, I tried my hand at making home-made dumplings . It came out all right, and it was definitely passable for a first attempt, but we always said that we should have another go at it. After all, if we liked it all right when we made it with no first-hand experience, it should come out even better after having at least one rep under our belt, right? We found out this weekend. First of all, the Mild Wife helped with the dough preparation this time around. I knew to be wary of making the dough too sticky this time around, but because she has more experience with baking, she was able to guide us through the pitfalls. What really surprised me was just how little water you can/should add at a time. We're talking about a tablespoon at a time when you're trying to make a ball of dough. I mean, I knew not to overwater it from previous experience, but it still surprised me to add in that little water at a time. Still, there was a method to this ( including the trusty sanduk...
Post a Comment
Read more

Inside and Outside

As I've mentioned before, the Mild Wife and I invested in a sewing machine during the pandemic. It was the most basic model we could find, but it was good enough for what we needed: to make a few masks. And now, over a year later, I still think that it was a good investment. Interestingly, even with restrictions being lifted a bit, we still find that we need masks. Some stores still require them, and neither of us wants to be in a position where we needed a mask and didn't have one. So, we still have to wear and wash them. And even though we've never run out of clean masks to wear, we did notice that we were close a couple of times. So, I recently broke out the sewing machine to make a few more masks. When we initially invested in supplies, we bought a pack of fabric squares. We figured we weren't going to need super high quality, and having a bunch of squares would give us options in case one of us screwed up (read: me). That also gave us the ability to add a little v...
Post a Comment
Read more

Pink

Way back in high school, there was a male teacher that all the girls thought was attractive. It was an open secret that a bunch of them had crushes on him. In fact, the school newspaper even did an article about him that quoted some girl saying, "he's so cute, he even makes pink look good." Yes, he had worn a pink shirt to school one day, and it had apparently been a big hit. I was reminded of this story when my sister-in-law suggested that she would choose pink as the color for her wedding and bridal party. I don't think I've ever made a color look good before, but I remember thinking, "well, I know it's possible to not look stupid in pink as a straight guy, I guess I can try." And I think that's almost exactly what I told her. I also happened to own a gray suit, so I figured the combination would look all right. However, I was pretty much the only one willing to play along. My sister-in-law's brothers wanted absolutely no part of th...
Post a Comment
Read more