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

[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.