We've been using the Triaminic strips for a long time...they fit in a fanny pack easily and even better for a wallet. Ours expire this month and I just learned that they are discontinued. What is everyone using now? My kids are 9 and 11. DS11 weighs over 100lbs and 5ft 5 so we really need an adult dose. Even if they made the spoons anymore, that's not really going to cut it for this kid! He'd need to carry 4 of them I think!
I can't locate a substitute...any ideas? Brownie
There really isn't a good alternative at the moment, since Benadryl strips are also discontinued.
There is truly no good way to carry a fast-acting adult dose otherwise. The gel caps require water to swallow and take longer to start acting.
So what is everyone doing? Carrying a bottle of Benadryl with them? I can't get 2 boys to carry a bottle of benadryl around. DH said they discontinued all of the portable varieties due to lack of sales. That is so frustrating.
Brownie
Honestly, my DS does not carry Benadryl around anymore. That's just not happening with an 18 year old. How I wish the man-purse would become fashionable!
When he did, he carried the Fast Melts. Are they still around?
I don't think so...unless it's an off-brand. Benadryl doesn't make them anymore as far as I know. The strips could go in a wallet! They couldn't be any smaller! They were totally awesome!
We've used the Benadryl way more than the epi. Sometimes it's just handy to have them for environmental allergies that get uncomfortable. We've offered them to people at the soccer field for bee stings. Sometimes one of my boys just gets a little nervous he might be having a reaction and it calms him down...ds11 has been feeling ill in movie theaters lately. We've concluded it's a visual thing but the first time he thought it was the Swedish fish he was eating so he took a Benadryl. We watched the red dye intake for months! The second time he couldn't pinpoint the cause...another benadryl. By the third time we concluded it was the movie itself! (he was getting a headache too). But the Benadryl makes him feel like he did something and we're heading it off just in case...the epi isn't a good option in a situation with mild nausea!
Brownie
If you decide to go with the spoons, CVS carries them in their brand. I've also found them @ drugstore.com
Thanks - I'll have to go look at CVS. There may not be a better option...at least it's something. Brownie
I just bought the Target brand of Fast Melts for my son (dumb me realized that I had the pens with me, not the Benadryl after DS1 had an allergy attack in the pet store).
Adults over 12 need 2-4 tablets (but they were easy open and did the job quick).
Thanks, YKW.
Do you know if those are dairy-free? (I know that is/was an issue for some members.)
up&up children's allergy melts
Not seeing dairy from my naked eye -
Active Ingredients: diphenhydramine HCl 12.5mg
Inactive Ingredients: D&C red#27 aluminum lake, D&C red#30 aluminum lake, dextrates, ethylcellulose polymers, FD&C blue #1 aluminum lake, grape flavor art #554, magnesium stearate, mannitol, polyethylene and polypropylene polymers, stearic acid, sucralose
For Questions: 1-800-910-6874
(I didn't look to see if they had an adult version of the fast melt because my kids aren't there yet. I know Benadryl used to have an adult version but DH always preferred the lesser children's version which took the edge off without making him comatose).
The Triaminic thin strips have not been discontinued in Canada. Probably no help unless you live close to the border.
Fyi, we used a store brand of fast melts and they melted in ds's belt.
there might some hospital grade or other such fast melty thing or strip that your pharmacist can do a special order on. Has anyone asked?
Adrienne
nameless, as far as I've been able to tell, there isn't one.
Compounding work would be done with diphenhydramine in powdered or liquid concentrates for use in gels, creams, saline for IV use, and oral elixirs.
COULD either concentrate be used to compound a fast-melting single-dose packet for oral administration? It's doubtful to me personally, given what I know of formulations work.
Unfortunately, this is a pretty specialized delivery mode, and it's one that pretty much has to be done industrially.
Read more about this technology here (http://legacy.uspharmacist.com/oldformat.asp?url=newlook/files/Feat/FastDissolving.htm&pub) and here. (http://www.pharmainfo.net/reviews/emerging-trends-development-orally-disintegrating-tablet-technology) Also see here (http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~kpark/Published%20Papers/Jeong%2008%20J%20Mater%20Chem.pdf) for a discussion of the materials chemistry behind the manufacturing problems involved. Thinstrips are an example of an "oral film" rather than a FDT. A discussion of the manufacturing of oral films is here. (http://www.ispub.com/journal/the-internet-journal-of-pediatrics-and-neonatology/volume-11-number-2/oral-films-patient-compliant-dosage-form-for-pediatrics.html) (That last one is clearly translated into English, but the information, while a little on the over-enthusiastic side, is mostly accurate).
Quick-dissolving TABLETS? That's do-able. Oral films, not so much.
Adding liquid to another fast-melting product will cause it to disintegrate (so using a glucose tablet and dropping diphenhydramine ONTO it won't work well), and drying out a hygroscopic material is.... well, difficult outside of a laboratory setting.
Using powder would require a binder of some sort that is safe for oral use, can be air-dried, and is stable enough to be sealed. The very properties of this kind of delivery system make two of those competing and contradictory in practical terms-- anything hygroscopic enough to work as an orally-dissolving strip is too hygroscopic to be readily handled in a standard compounding pharmacy at normal humidities. You'd need to make and seal them in a glove box under nitrogen, probably, if they were to be shelf-stable for months at a time. <sigh>
Chewables or rapidly dissovling tablets can be compounded with simple dry-compression methods-- but what would be the point, since those are still commercially available, YK?
Theoretically, you COULD use topical diphenhydramine products, which are readily absorbed systemically. The problem is that dosing is so darned unpredictable because it depends on both volume delivered and on surface area covered as well as rate of absorption through the skin. Darnit.
We, too, were HUGE fans of these strips. You could actually stuff a couple inside the carry-tubes with an epipen, and as brownie noted, put a couple in a wallet, for heaven's sakes! You certainly can't do that with fast melts, nevermind with a premeasured spoon.
The other nice thing about these was that it was possible to split the dose up by tearing the strips into halves or thirds.
I wouldn't mind buying some in Canada and mailing them - I will be in the USA next week. Not sure if they would be damaged in the heat, though - the box I bought recently doesn't say what temperature range it needs to be stored at.
I assume these are what you are looking for:
http://www.triaminic.ca/ca_en/products/100036_ingredients.shtml# (http://www.triaminic.ca/ca_en/products/100036_ingredients.shtml#)
Wasn't Benadryl one of the companies that struggled with recalls and pulled stuff off the market in their march to clean? I don't necessarily think it was a lack of market as much as most of the Benadryl products disappeared off the shelves.
It seems like places like Up & Up (Target), CVS and Walgreens have seen and filled the need in regards to spoons and fast melts - wonder if we could lobby for them to bring back the strips?
This is the sole reference that I've found to a formulation which is suitable for compounding work.
http://www.ijpc.com/Abstracts/Abstract.cfm?ABS=3282 (http://www.ijpc.com/Abstracts/Abstract.cfm?ABS=3282)
The only references that I've found to premanufactured strips for compounding work are 'robitussin' ones, and they, too, have been discontinued, apparently.
My guess is that the strips are relatively expensive to manufacture, and therefore the margin just isn't very high on them. What truly sucks is that this is one instance in which a compounding pharmacy can't really substitute for the product. :-[
Quote from: callisto on August 06, 2012, 04:37:06 PM
I wouldn't mind buying some in Canada and mailing them - I will be in the USA next week. Not sure if they would be damaged in the heat, though - the box I bought recently doesn't say what temperature range it needs to be stored at.
I assume these are what you are looking for:
http://www.triaminic.ca/ca_en/products/100036_ingredients.shtml# (http://www.triaminic.ca/ca_en/products/100036_ingredients.shtml#)
Those are them. :yes:
I still have two boxes, because they've been occasionally hard to find over the past two years, so I've always stocked up when I found them in stock.
I wonder, though, if a US pharmacy would be able to order them in special for us? They haven't been pulled because of any safety concerns, after all-- they just aren't marketed here anymore. I might have to make a few phone calls and find out.
Hmm.
The Triaminic website says they were discontinued due to lack of sales. There were no recalls and remaining product in stores and homes is fine to use.
http://www.amazon.com/Triaminic-Allergy-Strips-Grape-Flavor/dp/B0030HKZR8/ref=sr_1_32?ie=UTF8&qid=1344290547&sr=8-32&keywords=benadryl (http://www.amazon.com/Triaminic-Allergy-Strips-Grape-Flavor/dp/B0030HKZR8/ref=sr_1_32?ie=UTF8&qid=1344290547&sr=8-32&keywords=benadryl)
Triaminc strips on Amazon
Researching today, and found the following, both with the ingredient diphenhydramine, but in larger doses - good for my teenager:
Unisom SleepMelt Tablets
UrgentRx Allergy Attack Relief to Go
Both are available on Amazon.
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2013/03/20/urgentrx-is-reinventing-pills/ (http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2013/03/20/urgentrx-is-reinventing-pills/)
Interesting.
Love the product description. They are targeting a market for sure. And I'm thrilled with that.
(http://i20.photobucket.com/albums/b205/McCobbre/3D8DF36E-DA10-47E2-81C5-FB249361188D-508-000000DBE333E74C_zps8d3c940c.jpg) (http://i20.photobucket.com/albums/b205/McCobbre/7AD01975-4B70-4985-AE25-84F57F753AF4-508-000000DBE54B3F3C_zps5e9373fa.jpg)
Ugh--will not fit perfectly in a wallet like the Benadryl strips used to.
(http://i20.photobucket.com/albums/b205/McCobbre/4FE6EF2F-F0B5-4AB4-962D-C24A31E6DAC1-508-000000DBE026C9AA_zps7b943ccc.jpg)
so I found generic grape melti-mouth tablets for 12.5mg of diphen.hcl in CVS :)
Adrienne
Oooooh, I'll be heading there tomorrow. What a find!
I use Zyrtec. The adult dose is either one of the 10 mg tabs that you put on your tongue and it dissolves or two of the 5 mg chewables. Our allergist says it works faster than Benadryl.
I think for girls it's a lot easier, and it always has been. They can easily carry around things in a purse most of the time. The reason we have really missed the Benadryl and Triaminic melty strips is that the Benadryl tablets and little spoons are not easy forbteenage boys to carry in their pocket--along with 2 epis, Auvis and a cell phone (thank goodness out DS doesn't have to carry his inhaler all the time). Oh, and a wallet.
I will order these and assume one can fit into the wallet and is okay folded.
I got tiny little bottles from The Container Store that don't leak and put a dose in each one. Each epi kit has two bottles, each with one dose in them inside a zip lock freezer bag just in case. In all these years they have leaked out only twice and that was from movement of the lid as it got jostled around, not from the bottle leaking.
Yep, when DS was little we used those bottles, too. They are just amazing. I'm not thinking of the name--starts with an N. They work really well with a purse or bag situation.
We use the Target brand fast melt tablets too. I would squeeze about 4 of the tablets into his epi carrier (AllergyPack). But I would find that after a while they would start to get sort of crushed and powdery and I figured if someone tried to open them up the tablets wouldn't be very usable. I actually just recently found that I could fit 4 tablets (unopened, but cut into individual squares) into an empty mini-Altoid tin. I put a label on it and stuffed into the AllergyPack. This way they shouldn't get crushed. It's not a great fit into the AllergyPack, but it works.
Nalgene!!
That's the name of the amazing, leak-proof bottles that The Container Store sells. It came to me in the shower this morning. I swear I need a tub crayon, the shower is my thinkin place.
Jemmas--that's a great idea.
Scored some at CVS today, just in time to send back up to school with DS. :thumbsup: