What’s up with these pain relief powders I’m seeing in stores and advertised on TV lately?
I’ve never seen them before, but one of the commercials says “we’ve been using it for years;” is this some sort of old-fashioned thing that’s coming back or have I just been ignorant?
And is there anything at all to this claim about powders working faster or is it just marketing crap? For that matter, what is the stuff? Has anyone tried it? I keep imagining shaking ground-up aspirin onto my tongue like pixie stix … :vomiting smilie:
It’s not a new idea. BC Powder has been around since 1906. It is mainly ground aspirin with caffeine, and salicylamide added. I believe that powders offer the advantage of more rapid absorbtion over pills.
Tradition. In the South, people wanted “headache powders”; in the North, they took tablets.
Another advantage of the powder is that it can be dissolved in water and drunk by people who have trouble swallowing pills, but they never caught on in the north.
The BC trademark (#71536035, sept, 1947) gives a “first use in commerce” date of 1912 by B.C. Remedy Company Corporation of North Carolina, for a “remedy for headache and neuralgia in powder and tablet form.”
Block Drug of New Jersey is the last listed owner of the trademark, as of 1988. Block drug was acquired by GlaxoSmithKline in 2001.
When it chooses to, a pharmaceutical giant like GSK can quickly pump up a nationwide buzz around an old brand-name.
Goody’s is huge in the southeast. Though growing up in Milwaukee I’d never heard of it before getting into NASCAR. Then in my years of driving a semi I saw just how popular it is, especially in the Carolinas and Georgia.
I’ve tried it, and as the website attests, it works very fast. I just couldn’t find anything short of a cocktail that made it palatable. And I usually need a headache medicine after I drink the cocktails. Go figure.
Also, if anyone is interested, Goody’s has been a NASCAR sponsor for quite some time. They even have naming rights to a Cup race. Not cheap. Stuff has been a mainstay for enough to be very profitable.
We always had a pack of Goody’s in our house growing up as a kid. My father used them all the time. (He is from the south.)
I was getting migraines a lot a few years ago and bought a pack thinking the powder would work faster than a tablet. I’d just dump the packet of powder out into the back of my mouth and swallow with a sip of Pepsi.
They worked about as well as Excedrin, which is now a staple in this house.
Vincents APC, and Bex are the two big brands in Australia. They are quite easy to find, but are very old-fashioned (Cue 60s/70s slogan: a Bex and a good lie down). My 76 year-old father has always taken Vincents. I’ve probably had one or two in my life.
You can buy Goody’s in the Midwest, too. Walmart carries it around here, as do some grocery stores.
It’s almost the exact same thing as Excedrine-- painkiller with caffine to make it work faster. Since it’s powdered, it works faster than a pill does.
I’ve used it for years, and think it’s great. Be extremely cautious when taking it, though. Last time I took it, I poured it onto the back of my tongue, and accidently inhaled some of it through the back of my throat. It burned horribly, and I was tasting it for days.
Best way to take it, I think, is actually to pour it on the front of your tongue, and take a quick drink to wash it down.
About fifteen years back, I was in Japan for 6 weeks on business. No one knew how long I’d have to stay when I went (I got married two weeks after my return! Try making wedding plans via long-distance!), and as it turned out, I ran out of the Darvocet N 100 I took for headaches. I went to a local doctor, who gave me some kind of codeine compound instead.
But here’s the strange thing. They weren’t pills, but they also weren’t tablets. They were little packets of some kind of crystaline matter. I tried dissolving them in water; that didn’t work - the stuff wouldn’t dissolve! It was incredibly bitter in flavor (worse even than aspirin), and swallowing it just didn’t seem to work. It may have been stupid, but I ended up snorting the stuff, which was quite effective. (No, I wasn’t a druggy, but who hadn’t heard of snorting as a way druggies used to ingest drugs?)
But I’ve always wondered since just what the heck that stuff was (the form, not the drug) and how I was *supposed * to take it. Any Japan experts here who might know?
