While waiting for Godot and a psychologist, whoever comes first, I thought I would give Sudafed a try to see if it had any effect.

It's the sort with pseudoephedrine, being phased out many places. The good news is, I found some at the pharmacy at a reasonable price, took it home and tried a tablet this [Saturday] morning.

The bad news is, it had only very slight cognitive effects and didn't make me bright and alert -- made me drowsy at first, then settled back to normal scatteredness. The side effects were moderate, resembling one too many cups of coffee, and also there were visual effects like increase of brightness and over-contrasty appearance, very slight dizziness, and that pinched feeling around the bridge of the nose and around the eye sockets that I also get from caffeine.

Seems to be some insomnia too -- it's been 17 hours since taking it. 1 a.m., up and typing.

The other good news is that the remaining pills won't be wasted. They will be useful for when I have sneezy sniffly allergy attacks. I'd been using Claritin for my allergies and that doesn't work very well for me.

So that's my experiment for the week.

Ducky

NOTE I typed this on Saturday but had a lot of trouble posting it]

I took 4 x 60 mgs of pseudoephedrine (I think) once.

Then drank alcohol later on (just a little bit) and my head was still spinnng like mad! :eek:

240 mg?

That is way too much. Most cold/allergy sufferers take one 30 to 60 mg tablet.

4x60 mg could cause big problems. (chest pain, hypertension, racing heart, stroke (1% of the population is estimated to have unknown brain aneurysm too), problems in people with kidney issues.)

Be careful!

And, ofcourse, don't ever mix cold/allergy medication with pseudoephedrine in it with ADD stimulant meds, either.

Be careful! And, of course, don't ever mix cold/allergy medication with pseudoephedrine in it with ADD stimulant meds, either.

Right.

Usually I don't use meds of any sort, except ibuprofin for headaches on rare occasions. Any mixing and matching is going to be vetted through the net and my local pharmacist first -- I like my liver and intend to keep it for a long time.

Ducky

Pseudoephedrine/ephedrine is much more polar than amphetamines and has a much harder time crossing the blood brain barrier. Thus a dose that is high enough to have
a cognitive CNS stimulant effect is very high and has a massive SNS stimulant effect on the body.

Thanks, Theta.

[wikipedia]
SNS = Sympathetic nervous system
Sympathetic Nervous System (SNS) is a branch of the autonomic nervous system (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomic_nervous_system). It is always active at a basal level (called sympathetic tone) and becomes more active during times of stress (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stress_%28medicine%29). Its actions during the stress response comprise the fight-or-flight response (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fight-or-flight_response).

Oh well.

But at least I have a good decongestant in my arsenal.

Ducky