A friend of mine is addicted to nasal spray. You know, like Afrin.
Now, I use the stuff when I get a cold or when the Santa Annas are blowing up too much crap, and there’s no doubt it helps me breathe a lot easier.
My friend says he’s addicted to it and can’t breathe without it. Takes 1-2 hits/day. To him, it’s no big deal. He has the spray, he breathes fine, it solves his problem and doesn’t seem to have any adverse side affects (other than he needs to use it now).
Is there anything else he needs to worry about? Not looking for specific medical advice for him, but a general overview. Is the worst that can happen that regular users just need to keep using it? Because there’s times I wish I could use it for 4 - 5 days straight during bad colds, but I’m afraid of the side effects…
Can anyone satisfy my curiosity without taking it into the verbotten specific medical advice that’s frowned upon here?
I’ve been using it sixteen years on a daily basis. It’s inconvenient, I get really dry sinuses and occasional nosebleeds, and I wake up just about every night needing a hit. I’ve developed a dry little cough recently that kicks in about fifteen minutes after the Afrin kicks in and last practically until the next dose, which in now every few hours.
A few years into the addiction I managed to stop using another (prescribed) spray called I think, Beconase. I remember it smelled like roses. But I wasn’t prescribed it for long enough to completely kick the habit.
Last year I went in to try to get off the stuff again and I was told my sinuses were “a complete wreck” and that I’d never get off without having my sinuses
:cringe: scraped.
All this started because I thought nose spray was safer than DRUGS. :smack:
Mothers, tell your children to Stay Away from the Spray!
I was addicted to Afrin, briefly. My doctor put me on Flonase, and told me how to ease off the Afrin: only spray in my right nostril for about three days, while the Flonase kicks in. That way, until the Flonase starts working, my left side was stuffy, but at least I could breathe through the right side. He said that if, after three days, the Flonase still wasn’t working adequately, I could switch to Afrin in the left side for three more days.
See, when you use these sprays for too long, and then you stop, you get rebound swelling of the sinuses, and need more spray to relieve the swelling. By stopping using it just on one side, the side I’m not spraying is healing, while I can still breathe through the other side.
A naval ENT doctor I once knew was even more adamant than you, Rushgeekgirl. in his opinion nasal sprays were so destructive,
he wanted them all banned - at least all the OTC items.
Saline spray doesn’t cause addiction like the drug vasodilators. It just keeps your nasal passages moist (and hopefully cleaner) to prevent the irritation that makes them close up. (It is isotonic, therefore not drying, although there are hypertonic sprays available). It isn’t as effective as the drug spray, but with a little preventive maintenance it might keep you from ever needing to resort to a drug.
By the way, with any nasal spray, the tip needs to be cleaned regularly. No sense in coating it with all those nasty pathogens and allergens, and then shooting them right back up your nose after you’ve kicked the cold or allergy.
I heard much the same from Navy doctors when I briefly used them years ago. They certainly did not encourage use of the sprays.
I was told to only use them for short-term conditions, such as a bad cold, and emphatically told to NOT use the sprays for more than a few days at a time. I was told that extended use made users dependent on them, and that you get a massive rebound effect if you then stop use.
Sprays like Afrin are an especially bad choice for treatment of chronic conditions, such as allergies. Flonase is appropriate for long term use, but it takes a few days before you really notice any effect. (Flonase doesn’t have the dramatic effect of instantly clearing you up like Afrin.)
My wife, who was a Navy nurse at the time, told me about a patient she had seen in her clininc who had been hooked on Afrin for years. When he came in, most of his nasal septum had eroded away. :eek:
Chronic blood vessel constriction from regular use of nasal decongestants like Afrin could lead to lack of adequate blood flow to the nasal mucosa in severe cases over time, leading to worse problems fo atrophy, tissue breakdown, bleeding and infection. So it’s really best not to use that stuff for more than a few days at a time during a nasty cold.
If one is hooked, they should talk to their doc about getting off of it with nasal steroid sprays, as some posters have alluded to. In addition, saline nasal spray, also mentioned, are quite good at maintaining long-term nasal health without drugs. A neti pot (nasal flushing system) can help a lot.
I use a neti pot, mostly in the spring and fall, and I do find it helpful, though I still use flonase occasionally. It is not useful if you are already stuffed up.
I will relate one problem that I have sometimes with the neti pot. Every once in a while I get a severe headache which goes away as soon as I lift my head up (this phenomenon appears to be unrelated to the temp or salinity of the solution). This is not a big problem for me, but I know at least one person who says this happens enough to them that they will not use the pot.
My father’s an M.D. - like others (as reported in previous posts), he hates nasal sprays. I don’t use them myself because of his cautionary words. My job’s not one where how I sound is important, and I figure that being stuffed up is part and parcel of having a cold, so I use the OTC decongestants like Sudafed and such, and deal.
I mentioned earlier that a naval ENT doctor wanted all the OTC nasal sprays banned. I think he objected to the presence of epinephrine in these medications. This chemical is (I think) very potent and with prolonged use, can be highly destructive to nasal tissues.
Is this true?
And is it true that Sudafed (Extra Strength) and some other nasal sprays have epinephrine in them and should be avoided, or at least used only on a short term basis?
Does epinepine contribute to nasal spray addictiion?
When I was growing up in the 40s and 50s, my nose was clogged essentially the whole heating season. From more recent observations, I would conjecture that the fact that my parents smoked was at least partly responsible. The only thing that helped, and only a little, was snorting saline solution. Then nose sprays came along, probably around 1960. For maybe ten years I used them all the time, many times a day. Then I was in Denmark, in the summer of 70 or 71 and caught a bad cold and used up all my spray. I was desparate and finally got a prescription for a spray, nothing being available OTC, as far as I can tell. This was a pressurized spray, but I have no idea what was in it. But mirabile dictu, it had no rebound effect. After the cold ended I was over my addiction! Since then I have not entirely stopped using the spray, but have confined its use to two quite specific circumstances: if I cannot sleep as a result of a cold (but no matter what, I don’t use it during the following day), and if my nose is stuffed and I am getting on an airplane, I try to use it about a half hour before landing. Again, I ignore any rebound, which is minimal in anycase. Used thusly, it has not resulted in any addiction. But I would sure like to know what was in that Danish spray and wonder why that isn’t available OTC, while the addictive kind is.
BarnOwl, I am not aware of any epinephrine nasal sprays. Epinephrine is available over the counter in the US for treatment of bronchospasm (think primatene mist for asthma attacks) but it’s not a real good drug for that either. Better than respiratory arrest, but not as good as albuterol.
I’m another nasal spray junkie. I knew it was bad for the most part. A lot of sobering information in this thread. I didn’t know about nasal steroids. I have a crazy fear of not being able to breathe, so that makes kicking it worse.
Steroid nasal sprays (like Flonase) are only available by prescription; they don’t work right away like regular sprays do, and you have to use them regularly. But they do work, very well. I have that same fear of not being able to breathe, and particularly, I can’t sleep if I can’t breathe well. That’s why my doctor weaned me off of the Afrin while ramping me up on the Flonase. Talk to your doctor about it. Good luck!
I think I’ll try the “one nostril at a time” method that norinew mentioned. I think I can handle one plugged up nostril for a while.
Seriously, this has to stop, it’s gotten so ridiculous. Sometimes there will be a bunch of “empties” scattered around my apartment. At work, I’ll sneak off to the bathroom because I don’t want to be constantly “shooting up” in front of co-workers. Forgetting my bottle at home is cause for panic. I’ve actually wasted my lunch break to go on a desperate Afrin run.
