Your 99-cent pharmacy

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

I love 99-cent stores: Thanks to them, I have plastic, flower-shaped plates, potpourri made of 100% dyed wood shavings, and lurid yellow, intensely-lemon spray to clean stuff with. But I’ve not even begun to explore the health potential of these places, it seems.

Dr. Murray Grossan, a Los Angeles-based ear, nose and throat specialist, wrote to us to say he’d been nosing around a 99¢ Only Store and found all kinds of useful aids. ‘Instead of paying $75 for a tiny bottle of ear drops or $125 for a 10-day supply of antibiotics,’ he writes, ‘you can shop at the 99¢ Only Store and purchase budget-friendly medical items.’

Some examples:

• For post-nasal drip afflicting 35 million Americans with its ‘thick, stagnant mucus,’ Grossan suggests forgetting about pricey pills and purchasing the 99¢ Only saline spray. And then:

‘Toss out the contents -- it contains preservatives -- just like the $4 version. Pay 99 cents for a box of Kosher Salt (contains no silica or iodine) and mix your own saline solution: 1/4 teaspoon of Kosher salt stirred into four ounces of their 99¢ bottled water. Fill the spray container and spray 3 times a day. Since there are no preservatives, the solution needs to be made fresh weekly. In addition, be sure to drink huge amounts of hot tea with lemon and honey.’

• For stuffy nose, he recommends the store’s 99¢ spicy mustard, cut-rate cold and allergy pills and menthol-type inhalers.
• For coughing? He counted five different cough syrups at the store. And lozenges.
• For snoring -- get this -- you buy the 99¢ 1/2-inch medical tape and use it to tape up the tip of your nose before you go to sleep.
• Can’t sleep? Get 50-mg Benadryl capsules, the doctor says. One should do the trick. ‘Benadryl has been used since 1945, and there have not been any problems reported to date, which is more than you can say for sleeping pills that cost $5 each.’ (I myself can testify that not once, after taking one for allergies, have I woken up to find that someone’s been frying eggs in my kitchen all night.)

--Rosie Mestel