Another Excedrin hoax

[panache45]

A while back, the company that makes Excedrin came out with Excedrin Migraine. I’m sure a lot of migraine sufferers have bought it, thinking they’re getting some kind of superior pain relief. But if you read the label, it contains exactly the same ingredients as regular Excedrin, except that it’s sold with different packaging at a higher price.

Now they’re advertising a new Excedrin for tension headaches. According to the label, it contains acetaminophen and caffeine, which in my experience is in no way a cure for a tension headache - the caffeine might even make it worse. And, of course, it’s sold with new packaging at a higher price.

Is it legal to deceive people this way, through false advertising, or is it just a matter of caveat emptor? Can they make any sort of spurious claim or implication about their product, so long as the fine print (supposedly) tells the truth?

[toadspittle]

It’s perfectly legal. And research lately showed that the combo of acetaminophin and caffeine (i.e., the age-old Excedrin formula) is one of the more effective OTC treatments for migraines.

Tension headaches? I don’t even know what that means. Is that any headache that isn’t (a) from the flu or other illness (b) from a migraine or © from a sharp blow to the skull?

[UrbanChic]

a) On drugstore.com, a 100 count bottle of Excedrin Extra Strength and a 100 count bottle of Excedrin Migraine costs exactly the same.

b) It’s not deception if the information is readily available to the customer. All the customer needs to do is read the label of each item.

c) Excedrin may have been missing a market if they didn’t repackage Extra Stregth as Migraine.

d) I suspect Excedrin for Tension Headaches will cost the same, too.

[Dragonblink]

I noticed the similarity of ingredients last time I was in the drugstore trying to find a migraine medication that would keep me from having to go to the emergency room (couldn’t find anything), but I didn’t raise a stink because all the various flavors of Excedrin were the same price. I just bought the one that said “Migraine” on the bottle so my family would know the bottle was mine.

Caffeine is very effective in treating migraines because of its – I know the word but I’m not gonna try for it because I have a headache as we speak – its effect on the blood vessels in the head. I dunno if it’s effective for tension headaches, since I usually take Aleve, ibuprofen, or Fiorinal (which also contains caffeine) for those, but I suppose it’s possible.

Tension headaches are caused by muscle tension, hence the name. For example, there’s a muscle that starts somewhere around the eyebrows and goes over the top of the head down to the neck – if your shoulders are tense, this muscle can get tense and you’re in a world of hurt. Or so the doctor told me when I went in with a non-migraine headache that wouldn’t go away.

As far as I can tell, the headaches that “aren’t from anything else” are cluster headaches. Which I get too. There are also sinus headaches, headaches from allergies, headaches from sensitivity to smog (can you tell I was raised in LA?) … the list goes on.

– Dragonblink the walking pharmacy

[Larry_Mudd]

panache45: According to the label, it contains acetaminophen and caffeine, which in my experience is in no way a cure for a tension headache - the caffeine might even make it worse.

On the other side of this, it may seem like just the ticket for people who’ve been trying to cut down on their coffee intake and don’t realize that their headaches are part of their withdrawal from an extremely addictive substance. Of course, plain caffeine tablets would work just as well, with a much smaller impact on both the wallet and the liver.

We studied 62 normal adults whose intake of caffeine was low to moderate (mean amount, 235 mg–the equivalent of 2.5 cups of coffee–per day). […] at the end of each of two two-day periods during which they consumed caffeine-free diets […] More subjects had … moderate or severe headache (52 percent) during the placebo period than during either the base-line period (2, 0, 0, 0, and 2 percent, respectively; P less than 0.05) or the caffeine period (3, 2, 2, 0, and 6 percent; P less than 0.05).

That’s for moderate caffeine drinkers. There has been quite a bit of speculation that there may be a strong link between migraine headaches and heavy caffeine intake:

Severe caffeine withdrawal and migraine without aura are considered two distinct conditions, yet the two are indistinguishable from one another. Nobody seems to know or care why caffeine often effectively aborts even severe primary headaches, even though the ability of caffeine to abort primary headache offers insight into the neurochemical mechanism underlying primary headache. The near-universal use of caffeine, combined with the demonstrated ability of caffeine to potentiate a withdrawal syndrome indistinguishable from migraine without aura, suggests caffeine may be a major cause, if not the major or sole cause, of migraine without aura. Surprisingly, the possibility that caffeine withdrawal causes the entire phenomenon of primary headache is not excluded by existing experimental evidence.