• Question: if someone mixed 2 medicines together, for example, cough mixture and pain releif, would you stop getting coughs and be releived from your pain or do the chemicals react to make a different type of effect?

    Asked by ellac to Adam, Catherine, Leila, Nazim on 21 Mar 2012.
    • Photo: Adam Stevens

      Adam Stevens answered on 21 Mar 2012:

      It would totally depend on the specific medicines that you were talking about.

      Some of them will react and some won’t. A lot of medicines will have warnings on them advising you not to take them with [X], but actually it isn’t necessarily about the chemicals reacting but how your body reacts to both medicines. They might have side effects that interfere or could cause serious problems.

      There’s no way of predicting what could happen unless you knew the specific active ingredients of the medicine. A lot of cough medicines don’t really have any active ingredients, but that shouldn’t mean you go around taking them with everything else.

      If you were worried about something like this you should check with your Doctor, they should be able to help over the phone, or a pharmacist at the chemists could help too.

    • Photo: Leila Battison

      Leila Battison answered on 21 Mar 2012:

      Medicines are rarely simple, and most of them come with really strict instructions not to mix them, because each one is made up of lots of drugs mixed together.

      The specific mix of drugs in, say, cough tablets, has been tested, and is safe to take in the dose it says. It’s quite unpredictable what would happen if you mixed them up or took them in a different dose. It might do nothing, they might work together, or they might react badly to make dangerous chemicals in your body…

      Interestingly, cough mixture already has pain relief (paracetamol) in it, which is why you shouldn’t take paracetamol with it, because you might overdose.

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