Cough syrup left out in the cold
By Rita Rubin, USA TODAY
If your biggest decision about how to treat a cough is whether to take cherry- or grape-flavored syrup, you might find this a little hard to swallow: The American College of Chest Physicians is advising people who have colds not to waste their money on over-the-counter (OTC) cough syrups or drops, either for themselves or for their children.

Chest doctors conclude that there is no evidence that cough syrups relieve cold symptoms.
USA TODAY

Of the estimated 829 million visits to doctors' offices each year in the USA, nearly 30 million are for coughs, the doctors' group says.

The new advice, part of the most comprehensive guidelines yet on diagnosing and treating coughs, appears in this month's issue of the journal Chest. The chest doctors, who reviewed scores of studies dating back decades, conclude that there is no scientific evidence that suppressants, such as dextromethorphan, or expectorants, drugs such as guaifenesin that thin out mucus, relieve coughs that are the result of colds.

"Cough is so common, and there are medicines that actually work," says guidelines committee chair Richard Irwin, professor of medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. If you feel you need to take something, he says, "take something that has been shown to be helpful."

Irwin's committee echoed a 2004 paper by the Cochrane Collaboration, a non-profit group that reviews scientific evidence for medical treatments: "There is no good evidence for or against the effectiveness of OTC medicines in acute cough."

A spokesman for Wyeth Consumer health care, maker of Robitussin products, disputed the conclusions. "Our stance is that the FDA has reviewed dextromethorphan and guaifenesin and found the two ingredients to be both safe and effective," Fran Sullivan says. "We don't believe that consumers would ... re-purchase these products if they weren't efficacious."

OTC cough medicines have been shown to have a strong placebo effect, Irwin says. And coughs from colds eventually go away on their own, he says. If a cough persists for weeks on end, he says, it might be a result of something more serious than a cold and should be brought to a doctor's attention.

I bought cough medicine once, it worked for about 5 seconds after swallowing and that was all. Fishermans Friend works better.