Excedrin has several generics. Are they under recall, too? Also, you can always get BC powder and add the Tylenol, so you don’t have to pound down a caffeinated drink.
I’ve given my sister homemade Excedrin before–it still works. (I get migraines, too, but I can’t stand caffeine, and Excedrin fails without it, for me. Luckily, mine are never so bad that they wake me up, so I just take some basic pain medicine during the nearly painless aura phase and go to sleep until the migraine is over.)
Also, if you’re wondering, acetaminophen (Tylenol) and aspirin work so well together partly because they both stop pain by different yet related mechanisms, meaning that their effects are not just additive but synergistic. The caffeine has two purposes–it speeds up the other pain medications, yes, but it also works on migraines itself–it’s a vasoconstrictor, and a lot of the effects of migraines is due to the expansion of blood vessels in the brain. (Although migraines are actually caused by electrical imbalances, aka miniature seizures, this in turn causes reduction of serotonin, which, among other things, is a natural vasoconstrictor.)
No. As Smeghead pointed out just a few posts above, generics of Excedrin and the other Novartis brands are easy to find. The issue some people have is that, while the active ingredients are the same, they find the generics aren’t as effective (whether due to bioavailability of the ingredients or placebo effect).
That said, generics manufacturers and competing brand name distributors have been making hay the last year on providing alternatives to the recalled products, similar to the big push by analgesic suppliers to capitalize on the J&J recalls and shortages that have gone on for almost two years. Bayer was pushing its Vanquish brand as an alternative (despite having differing amounts of the three active ingredients), has launched a Bayer Migraine product which has the same strength and ingredients, and places have Walmart have given nearly 8 linear feet of shelf space to the large amount of Excedrin generics that have been quickly selling.