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Comment by samtho | Hacker News Reader

> I've found with most medications looking for an active ingredient and an amount is helpful. You can search for effectiveness or side-effects.

Is this not common practice? I would be uncomfortable taking an ambiguously labeled “cold medicine” pill, personally. I know which medicines are effective for me and which are a waste of time and money.

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The vast majority of the population has zero interest in looking at what is in medicine, and even less interest in researching those long complicated names.

They buy a brand that promises to fix what they don’t like, and if it works, they buy more next time.

This is something quite striking in US where there is a full aisle of "cold medicines", "headache pills", "back pain reliefs", "muscle ache aides" etc, and they are all the same stuff (ibuprofen/"Advil" or paracetamol/acetaminophen/"Tylenol") in different packages. In Finnish pharmacies it's mostly just three or so "generic" paracetamols or ibuprofens in different brands.

Sounds like an untapped market just waiting for more market differentiation to ‘help’ the consumer!

You get that in the US, too. The funny thing is that in many cases, the generic compound is sold in a box that is similar to the box that the "brand-name" version is sold in; they'll sell the same thing in different colored boxes.

https://www.cvs.com/search?searchTerm=acetomeniphen https://www.cvs.com/search?searchTerm=ibuprofin

I think this only supports their point. If you follow the acetomeniphen link and filter only for CVS brand items, there's still 51 different ones. Sure some are sensible divisions, like low dose for children, liquid versions, nighttime versions with something to make you drowsy.

But there's also one bottle of pills labeled as Arthritis Pain Relief. And one labeled as Muscle Pain relief. Which both have exactly the same medicine and the same time release capsules.

There's a Migraine variant label, a Tension Headache variant label. Just "Headache" relief. There's Back and Body pain relief (though that one is Apsirin, it's just showing up in the acetomeniphen search).

Most of them (especially the cold medicines) are not just ibuprofen/acetaminophen but are a "cocktail" that will also include dextromethorphan, guaifenesin, phenylephrine, diphenhydramine, etc in different combinations/amounts depending what they are intended for. I don't personally use them but I could see how it could be useful rather than buying a bunch of individual medications.

> This is something quite striking in US where there is a full aisle of "cold medicines", "headache pills", "back pain reliefs", "muscle ache aides" etc, and they are all the same stuff (ibuprofen/"Advil" or paracetamol/acetaminophen/"Tylenol") in different packages

Some years back, Reckitt (British-Dutch multinational) got in trouble with the ACCC (Australia's competition and consumer protection regulator) for doing this. Selling "Headache Pain", "Back Pain", "Period Pain", etc all next to each other, despite all having identical active ingredients. The ACCC took them to court for misleading consumers, and won.

https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/full-federal-court-ord...

Yeah that was their Nurofen brand.

"We can charge twice as much if we put it in a pink packet and say it's for period pain".

Very deceptive.

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