alt Hacker NewsWorse, the symptoms gets worse after you stop using it, see rhinitis medicamentosa.
Many people have used decongestants so much they cannot quit them or will have to suffer weeks of nasal congestion. I risked going through that; later I swore I will never touch one ever again.
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Kind of funny to see a medication that's super common in Germany, widely recommended by doctors, given to children, etc. to be discussed in those terms.
I've been through this and sucked hard. Never will I use a decongestant nasal spray again.
If there was a way to somehow sum up all of the suffering caused by these sprays from dependency (which lasts weeks, months, years even) and compare that with the suffering alleviated from a cold (which lasts a fews days), my bet is these cause more harm than good.
Same. I’d rather start and quit smoking again than this.
> Worse, the symptoms gets worse after you stop using it,
Very tangentially, "iatrogenic" is a nice niche vocabulary word: Something unintentionally caused by a medical activity, usually undesirable.