Medical question

[vvvexation]

How necessary are expectorants when one has a chest cough? I mean, do you get better faster if you cough up all the crud faster, or will it go away on its own even if you don't hasten the up-coughing process?

Comments

[deyo.livejournal.com]

Like cough suppressants, expectorants are intended to make you feel better. If hacking up phlegm doesn't feel better than having it sit there, don't take an expectorant. :)

[fyfer.livejournal.com]

The NP I saw at Tang told me I should have been using an expectorant and cough suppressant more regularly when I had my month-long lingering crud. He gave me codeine + guafenisin and said that without suppressing the cough I was just letting my lungs stay irritated indefinitely and they wouldn't heal til I stopped coughing. I'm not sure how sound his logic was. The logic in my sentence above is abysmal but I'm not feeling very coherent.

I'd had a nasty cough for a month though (there was certainly some sort of bronchitis going on, just not bacterial) so it might have been more necessary in my case than usual.

[fyfer.livejournal.com]

(He also gave me an albuterol inhaler so I could stop the lung spasms I kept getting from coughing.)

If you are short on cash for meds, btw, I'm very unlikely to use either thing again. At least, I'm hoping a cough that bad was a once-a-decade sort of thing. I suppose I shouldn't pass on prescription meds but it's hard to feel like codeine really counts.

[vvvexation.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. *ponders dragging self to Plough*

[mactavish.livejournal.com]

I've heard that from several different doctors. I always get a chronic cough after an upper respiratory infection. I had the flu in early January and I'm still hacking away. It gets self-perpetuating. My doctor's said she'll give me codeine if I can't make it go away gradually on its own.

[tshuma]

It is sound logic: using a cough supressant means you cough less and thus irritate your lung tissue less, using an expectorant means that when you do cough, it's productive and gets the crap out of your lungs more quickly and completely than it does without it.

[fyfer.livejournal.com]

Yeah, true. I was just trying to figure out if expectorant and suppressant were too opposed to each other. But that makes sense.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

My understanding is: nice but only occasionally necessary, yes, usually.

I use it.

[phinnia.livejournal.com]

I never gave the kiddo any during his last chest cold, we just used vicks and those vapor plug things.

[cyan-blue.livejournal.com]

Hope you feel better soon!

[caesia.livejournal.com]

I will send Sai back with some of my loot from my recent bout with pneumonia... They gave me like everything ever invented for cough suppression, I swear. I have codeine syrup and Tesselon pearls and these ubermegapseudoephedrineslashexpectorant things. The codeine syrup seriously works wonders and knocks you right out : p but the tesselon is nondrowsy. *pobrecita*

A dry cough hurts like hell after a while. It's what gives you the bouts of coughing that go on and on and on and incidentally how I strained three muscles in my belly and sides. A 'wet' cough with phlegm doesn't do that nearly as much. Trust me, wet is better. And it sounds more pitiful when you're explaining to your teachers why you missed the midterm.

totally off-topic, but

[tshuma]

that is one of the cutest icons I've seen. really. =)

Re: totally off-topic, but

[caesia.livejournal.com]

hee! Ghenked the pic off ratemykitten.com 'cause it was just so... descriptive. ^^

[caesia.livejournal.com]

Er. Well. I intended to, but there he goes *watches car driving away* minus syrup. Foo.

[vvvexation.livejournal.com]

I think I might actually have some codeine syrup lying around myself. Not much left IIRC, but possibly enough.

[japlady.livejournal.com]

Mom had been a head nurse, she said she once saw a paticent who had drowned on their own phlem, she was VERY adement that we had to take an expecterant and NOT a suppresent (and blow, don't sniffle). Basically the expecterent loosens it so you can cough it out of your lungs, or at least so the little hairs can do their job and move it out.

[haggis-bagpipes.livejournal.com]

You get better because of the psychological effect of having some sort of treatment!

[lintqueen.livejournal.com]

One more opinion. Expectorant is a Good Thing early on when you've got GUNK to cough up.

However, if you continue to cough, and it's a "non-productive" cough (that dry, nasty hack hack thing) *that's* Not Helpful and is terribly self-perpetuating. Coughing makes lungs unhappy. Unhappy lungs cause you to cough. Lather, rinse, repeat. At that point you need a cough suppressant *or* if that doesn't work, they'll usually put you on something steroidal (inhaler thingy, like albuterol)...