My latest Equate acetaminophen has a sucralose coated shell. I get brand names doing it, but generics?
You mean placing it on your tongue and washing it down with red wine? You’re doing it wrong.
The line from the commercial for this stuff is “This is America, home of not just what you want but you didn’t even know you wanted.” (or something close to that)
Now this is concerning. They seem to be appealing to peoples’ curiousity and gluttony in order to sell what is meant to be a short-term treatment for acid-reflux. This stuff isn’t a side-effect free medicine. Studies have shown that long-term usage may lead to osteoporosis and weaking of the bones; as well as other medical complications. It isn’t meant to be taken by millions and millions of people as an everyday supplement to combat overeating. But that seems to be how it is being marketed. And with this new flavored variety, they seem to have stepped it up a notch.
Actually, isn’t it kind of the point of advertising to sell you “what you didn’t even know you wanted”?
I’m guessing/hoping these ads are targeted at people who would otherwise be buying the cheaper generic/store brand version of Prilosec.
*absolutely hate the coating. It is sickly sweet and you cant swallow it fast enough to avoid the taste. I will never buy this product again.
I’ve tried it because it was on sale and I take the regular kind daily anyway. Like jmsull, I’m not a fan. It’s kind of overpowering, and it’s not as brief as you’d guess the taste from a pill you swallow with water should be.
This is an example of fixing a problem that never existed in the first place. And the solution to this “problem” turns out to be more problematic than the original “problem” itself.
I can understand why they’d do this: there’s a bunch of different antacid pills on the market and not much to distinguish them or keep a person loyal to one brand. Sure, some people might be turned off by the flavor but I’m sure a whole bunch of people will try it and at least some will like it enough not to switch to Pepcid, Tagemet, or any of the others.
Weird idea, but I get it.
Sounds like they’re trying to win people back to the name brand. I’m sure the generics have taken a nice chunk out of profits. I get my omeprazole in capsule form from a supplier on Ebay who gets it from Mexico. Costs me $4.50 a month.
Also, “wildberry” is a non-existing fruit, so it can be any kind of chemical flavoring. If they said it was strawberry or blueberry, etc., there are rules requiring that it contain at least some part of that fruit.
And as to the reason: a significant percentage of people have difficulty swallowing pills whole, so they end up chewing them. For them, something added to cover up the foul tase of many medicines is helpful.
Cite? It was my understanding that substances like castoreum are technically “natural flavoring” because it comes from a beaver’s glands. A product can say it is strawberry flavored but be artificially flavored, and AFAIK can be at least partially flavored by beaver ass (not that there’s anything wrong with that) and be considered from natural sources.
For certain classifications there may be requirements. Like how a product can only be called juice if it is at least X% real juice.
Of course you cannot chew or crush SR pills.
The box for these pills state in big bold letters that you cannot chew them.
Unfortunately, GERD isn’t merely caused by over-eating. Almost all asthmatics, myself included, have GERD, and there are other genetic factors that cause it too that also have nothing to do with one’s eating habits.
I know this is a zombie, but still got to reply…
Ranatidine, the active in Zantac does actually have a peppermint flavor to it. The mint flavor you like isn’t added, they just didn’t cover it well enough. It makes the liquid version a bitch to flavor for children, the only option is grape, and even then, it becomes grape with a weird peppermint after taste…
Since you sound like you know something about these things, is there any meaningful difference between the various “-dine” pills? Pepcid AC, Tagemet, and Zantac all claim the exact same performance with the same 1-pill dose. Aside from price-per-dose, is there any reason to choose one over another?
Agreed. It’s also a small capsule, and one that I (aka, the Girl With the Esophagus Stricture) had no problem taking.
Why can’t they coat something like those horrible Ceclor and Ceftin antibiotic pills instead? Talk about an awful taste that revisits…
The vagaries of the human body; sometimes one works drug works better than the other. These days, Prevacid works better than Prilosec for me, but they are very, very similar drugs.
Among the H2-antagonists, Cimetidine (Tagamet) has the most drug interactions, so I tend to lean against recommending it as a first choice when making OTC recommendations, but otherwise, there shouldn’t be much of a difference between one product and the next. As others have stated, some people respond better to one drug in a class versus another, so I tend to recommend the least expensive available option (except where cimetidine is the least expensive) first, and work up from there until you find the drug that works best for you.