I found myself with The First Cold Of The Season™ the other day and discovered to my chagrin that I was completely out of DayQuil. I neglected to buy enough during my last trip home, and you sure as heck can’t get it in Japan without a prescription.
Japan in general seems less keen on the idea of self-medication than we do in the west. Even asking questions about your medical treatments is a bit odd (Doctor: “You’re sick, I’ve got to give you medicine.” Patient: “What sort of medicine?” Doctor: “White pills and brown powder”). I remember my friend lecturing me a bit (about taking medicine without asking a doctor first) after I gave her some ibuprofen to help with the pain of her broken wrist. What I mean to say, I guess, is that there aren’t a whole lot of people around who can “recommend a good brand of over-the-counter cold medicine for me”. Nonetheless, I was out of DayQuil, and I hate having to budget for how many times per year I can get sick, so I decided to hunt around for a Japanese brand that I could “trust”.
So, standing in the “cold medicine” section of the pharmacy, I was faced with a bewildering array of choices. How on earth do you even choose what’s good? At home, you have “the brand my parents used to give me when I was a kid” as a guide. At the very least, you can go for “brand recognition”—anything that there’s a TV commercial for must be good. Well, and of course you can’t discount the placebo effect. For both my mother and sister, Advil is more effective than generic Ibuprofen because they think it is. Not only do I not have my “childhood brands”, but I also don’t have TV ads (pharmaceutical ads don’t make the one Japanese TV show that I watch), and certainly I don’t trust any of them enough for the placebo effect to kick in.
All of the drugs say roughly the same thing… spending any amount of time with a dictionary will show you that they all claim to cure fever, runny or blocked nose, cough, phlegm, watery eyes, etc. The worst thing is that I was standing there, deep in the thick thick cloud of stupid that for me seems to accompany the first few days of any cold. So, I grabbed a random box that said “extra strong” and was done with it.
And, for about 2 minutes, I was surprised at how cheap and effective the medicine was. Comparing the “active ingredients per tablet”, the Japanese brand compared favourably with the DayQuil (actually, with the generic no-name DayQuil substitute). This surprised me greatly, as Ibuprofen, for example, costs $10.00 for the equivalent of 13 American-strength pills (200mg). Unfortunately, my happiness was short-lived, as I actually noticed that on the Japanese box, I was looking at “active ingredients per 6 pills”. So, the Japanese stuff works just fine, as long as you take 12 pills at the same time, which means that a single dose is about $4.00.
Yeah, I did find some working Japanese pills, but for the money, I think I’ll get more Generic DayQuil Substitute™ next time I’m in Canada.
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