this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2023
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Does anyone know if phenylephrine is otherwise harmless? If it's essentially harmless, and assuming all these various products have other ingredients that remain effective, then it seems to me that the easiest thing for the companies to do is to move phenylephrine from the "active ingredients" section to the "inactive ingredients" section.
Oh no, phenylephrine definitely has effects. It's just that decongestion isn't one of them. Intravenous phenylephrine is sometimes used in critical care hospital settings to deliberately raise a person's blood pressure:
https://www.lhsc.on.ca/critical-care-trauma-centre/phenylephrine-neosynephrine
It is harmless. But moving it to the inactive ingredients will still leave many of them without a decongestant and they’ll have to change all of their packaging/marketing. The other ingredients are usually for fever reduction or cough suppression. It would be a waste of their money to keep a useless ingredient.