Ars TechnicaThe spectacular downfall of a common, useless cold medicine
This week's unanimous vote on phenylephrine's ineffectiveness was decades in the making.
Bytebro 🇬🇧 🇺🇦 🇬🇱@arstechnica That particular product name, I believe, came from pseudoephedrine, which does in fact work, but that got classified as 'pharmacist-only' because home chemists were using it to cook meth. So they switched to phenylephrine (hence the 'PE' suffix), which seems to be basically a placebo.
If I'm wrong on any of that, of course I'd welcome a correction!