I have been for years. It’s a miserable situation to be in; the more you use, the more you need. Quitting cold turkey is next to impossible (assuming you like breathing).
Anyway, I’ve recently run across a website that offers a kit that gradually weans you off of the stuff over a period of weeks. It sounded promising, so I happily place my order.
Today is day 1.
I am while I sleep and have been for probably 2 years completely, several more off and on. And I have to use the heavy-duty menthol stuff. Sigh. I’d love to hear about whatever it is you’re trying. Can you PM me the information?
It only takes a couple of days to wean off it.
In the meantime, just use the saline sprays instead; it will help, not addictive.
Trust me, nasal sprays are all I use when I get a cold, and I know where you’re coming from. But there is no reason not to just bite the bullet for a day and get over it.
Have you tried weaning off the stuff one nostril at a time? I know how addictive that shit is (and how much it sucks to have your nasal airways slammed shut), but that might be another approach.
In my case, yeah. I’ve weened off of it for weeks at a time and all I end up losing is sleep. Saline doesn’t seem to help and I’ve taken the advice here on the Dope before and gotten a Neti Pot, much to no avail. I don’t know what else to do, which is why I’m interested in the OP’s product that he found.
Yeah, I tried the neti pot thing too, but only once, because it seemed to congest me even more than I was before.
One day? I wish. If it were just a day, I’d be all over it. In reality, I’d be facing 5-7 days of total suffering. (Don’t forget, it heavily affects your quality of sleep, which intensifies the daytime suffering.) Saline does nothing to relieve my congestion.
It’s really an ingenious system (though over-priced). You use a provided dropper bottle that has your specific active ingredient in it when you need relief. As the days go by, and the level of the liquid decreases, you watch for it to reach a marking on the bottle. When this occurs, you fill the bottle back to the original mark with saline. Continue as before, again re-filling with saline when you reach the lower marking. As time goes by, you are using a weaker and weaker concentration of the med and, supposedly, attaining relief. Eventually you are squirting nothing but saline up there.
I don’t know if we’re allowed to post links, or even name names, (and I don’t want to come off as a shill), so PM me if you’d like to know the name of the product.
I don’t even know for certain if it’ll work for me, but it sure sounds good in theory.
Been there, done that suffered the affects of nasal spray addiction, I had to finally use a prescribed oral steroid pill. It involved weening down from several pills a day to none. You may have to see a doctor to get a prescription, but it works.
By using steroid nasal sprays and/or saline nasal rinses, addiction to nasal decongestants can be beaten! Consult your physician, or a good ENT doc.
Cold turkey works too, but most folks won’t put up with it.
Cold turkey plus saline nasal rinses would be my recommendation for those who don’t work with a physician on the problem.
Steroid sprays are usually pretty effective if used appropriately.
Leukotriene inhibitors are sometimes used (accolate, singulair, and similar) but I’ve never had much success with them.
Oral steroids are the nuclear weapons of nasal relief, I’d leave them for last (but I have opted to prescribe them for some folks).
I’ve been addicted to Afrin for years. It has to be the blue bottle Afrin Sinus. Nothing else works. I go through a bottle a week and have been addicted since I was pregnant with my first daughter…she’ll turn 21 in June.
I tried steroid sprays and pills. Nothing helped. They may have some wonderful new med now and I’d be more than willing to try it if I could afford it. I tried weaning one side at a time, but within hours I start choking. My last doctor told me if the steroid med didn’t work I’d need sinus surgery to scrape away the tissue. Without insurance I continue to buy the Afrin every week. Neti pot didn’t do a thing but make me need it as soon as I was done with the pot.
:eek:
If you were my patient, I’d have you off it quite quickly.
Of course, if you were my patient, you’d be incarcerated, adding an additional element of control. 
(We’ve eliminated medications like afrin from the corrections canteen, and restrict prescribing it to exceptional cases for short-term only, because it was so extensively abused by our inmates.)
I would suggest consulting an ENT doc (or another one, if you’ve done so before). Your savings from no longer having to buy name-brand Afrin ought to eventually compensate for the expenses. And having an expert advise you on the concentration of salt to use in the saline rinse (to ensure it’s strong enough to decongest the tissue rather than hydrate it further) would be key to turning things around.
If you want, of course. There’s no law (and minimal social stigma) forbidding Afrin overuse. But chronic use can have bad consequences, such as nasal tissue breakdown and holes in the nasal septum. Sort of like the consequences of excess cocaine snorting, only not occurring nearly as often as with cocaine.
I’ve never gotten addicted to it and I take it pretty religiously when I’m stuffy. Though I haven’t really needed to in a while (I haven’t been that stuffed up). But you’d think I’d have gotten addicted considering I ignore the “every 12 hours” thing on the label…
What decongestants do you offer, then? Oxymetazoline has an enormous potential for dependency, but it’s also the most effective decongestant I’ve ever used. Alternatives in this meth-terrified culture seem to be limited to first-gen antihistamines like chlorpheniramine (which usually work but dry out my sinuses something fierce), and that totally useless drug phenylephrine.
I got addicted to the stuff twice, and each time I used a simple technique to break the addiction.
When I used half the bottle, I then refilled it to the top with a sterile saline solution. Use half of that, and refill it again with sterile saline. Repeat as necessary. I still got the benefits, but weaned myself off of the nasal spray without any of the side effects. It’s kind of like homeopathy, except it works. 
I beat mine with some Nasonex or Flonase - both steriodal sprays from the doctor.
Since then, I am very, very careful about using Nasal sprays - I never use the 12 hour ones and stop after two days, whether I am stuffed up or not…
I appreciate all the responses.
Today is day two of my new regimen. The stuff I’m using to wean myself doesn’t work as well as Old Trusty, but it did get me through the day. The night was a different matter - I didn’t sleep great and woke up feeling as if someone filled every sinus cavity with that spray insulation foam. A few drops of Love Potion #9 and I was OK, though.
But I’ve gone one day without hitting the crack pipe (so to speak); hopefully every day will be a tiny bit better than the last.
This is basically what I’m doing with my purchased kit. Not sure how you’d know when half the bottle was gone with regular OTC sprays, though.
Just popping in to add some encouragement. It can be beaten! Many years ago I was addicted (for several years, if I recall), and it took a lot of effort to wean myself off, but I did it eventually using the spray and then dilute method. Not particularly pleasant, but it worked.
I occasionally have to use nasal sprays these days when I have a particularly bad cold, and try not to abuse it too much. However, it is sometimes hard to self regulate (what with my love of breathing), and thus I ended up dependant on it after a bad christmas cold this year (combined with pregnancy stuffiness - ack). I spent at least a week dreading giving it up, and just spent last weekend weaning myself off it. Luckily, it wasn’t as bad as I was expecting, probably because I’d only been using it for a couple of weeks at that point. I also tried a saline nasal spray this time to help, and a neti pot as well, but they really didn’t seem to make that much of a difference at all.
Now that I am off the nasal spray, though, I may try persisiting with the neti pot, as my sinuses are always a little quick to clog up (especially at night), and I would love to be able to count on breathing whilst I’m asleep. Also, I keep reading so many positive things about neti pots on here that I have overcome my initial lack of enthusiasm to see if they are the magic cure all that has been promised.
Anyway, good luck - I hope the dilution method works for you. Everytime you are tempted to get some relief by using the proper nasal spray again, just remind yourself that it’s a short term misery for a long term gain. It really is rather nice not to have to depend on a spray, believe me!
Thanks, Neeps! I think my problem really became apparent to me when I cleaned out my bedside table drawer and found maybe half a dozen empties; I felt like an alcoholic with a collection of empty vodka bottles.
Also, I had 5 or 6 locations where I felt I had to stash a sniffer: car, bedside, medicine cabinet, backpack…lest I be caught somewhere without one.
I was addicted for maybe 15 years. When I was going to Europe for a year, I took along a couple dozen bottles. But I ran out. I went to see a doctor in Denmark since they didn’t sell it OTC there. He gave me a prescription for some steroidal spray. The only thing I remember about it was that it had a pressurized propellant, rather than a squeeze bottle. It worked! The doctor never said that the purpose was to wean me, but it worked. There was no rebound and I have been off spray since. I use it only for two occasions: when I have a head cold, during the night in order to sleep, but suffer the rebound the next day (not too bad); and when flying to protect my ears. My doctor recommends the latter use strongly. Again, I ignore any rebound.
Bless that Danish doctor. This was nearly 40 years ago, incidentally, so didn’t involve anything that could be considered new now.
I do use saline spray freely since it is good in itself and there is no rebound. They charge an outrageous $4 for an ounce of distilled water and .009 ounces of pure salt. But I buy a large bottle of contact lens fluid (also sterile physiological saline) and refill it. In fact, I boiled the bottle and pump for ten minutes first the last time (along with the funnel I used). It is not as good as medicinal spray, but it helps.