Benylin cough medicine con😩 11 March 2014 at 12:36PM in MoneySaving mums 4 replies 1.7K views

Pnurse

I just wanted to warn other 'coughers' to save your money!!!

I have had a chesty cough for over two weeks and having used the Benylin chesty cough medicine for a couple of days without any improvement thought I'd see if there was a different product to try. There on the shelf in the local chemist was a Benylin mucousy cough medicine costing £5 which I bought.

Later that day after I had taken some I read the packaging to see what the ingredients in each one were and was shocked to find that the two medicines were identical!

I phoned Johnson and Johnson to see if they would reimburse my money and to inform them of my concerns. They would not give me my money back but said they will pass on my concerns. They said they sell the same medicine in different packaging so that people who don't understand that a chesty cough is the same as a mucousy cough! I suggested that they just label one box with 'Chesty/Mucousy Cough' instead so other people aren't like me and pay double for the same product!

~Beanie~

And if you had checked the labels before buying, you would probably have found an own brand or lesser known brand with exactly the same ingredients for about a third of the price

DomRavioli

There's nothing illegal about what they are doing - just because you don't agree with it doesn't mean it will change.

Mucous is pretty simple - you learn it in GCSE biology; they can't be held responsible for your level of education or knowledge - surely you would have asked a pharmacist if you needed assistance?

And there is quite a lot of medical evidence to state cough medicines don't really work.

19lottie82

I thought it was common knowledge that many over the counter medicine manufacturers also made "own brand" similar products for boots, Asda, Tesco, and the like?

Not just for medicines either, many brand names also make products for supermarkets.

tea_lover

That's a very odd thing to join up to post about, and in a wierd part of the forum too. It must be a troll, but I can't work out what it hopes to achieve with that post... other than maybe getting the post count up enough to start posting spam links.

Oh, and cough medicine is not recommended. Complete waste of money.