Shelley Bridgeman: Christmas headaches and Nurofen

I'm not a pill-popper by nature, but I might take a couple of painkillers to keep the food-wine-sunshine headache at bay, says Shelley. Photo / Getty

At about 5pm on Christmas Day I sometimes end up feeling a little bit lost. After planning menus and gifts for weeks prior it's kind of strange when December 25 is all but over.

The presents have been opened, the crackers have been pulled, the guests have gone and the lunch dishes are in the dishwasher. Now what?

The sense of unease is accentuated by the fact that I am out of my routine in more ways than one. My usual weekday lunch consists of soup and a bread roll. I'm not used to having a multi-course meal in the middle of the day.

I'm not accustomed to imbibing at lunchtime either. Perversely, those effervescent glasses of bubbly can end up making me feel dull and lethargic.

But, I am a trooper (as well as a slow learner) and I will repeat all this the next day for sure. This year I plan to try to avert the mild blues that threaten to descend late afternoon. I'm going to reserve my place in the hammock beneath the apricot trees and settle in with a great book, a cool drink and maybe some smooth tunes.

And, although I am not a pill-popper by nature, I might even take a couple of painkillers to keep the food-wine-sunshine headache at bay.

Nurofen would normally be my drug of choice but recent news has made me dubious about using it.

Evidently, some of its products have been "ordered off the shelves in Australia" in the wake of "revelations that its pain-specific headache painkillers are not specific at all - they're all the same ingredients".

Customers were misled into "thinking that its Nurofen Back Pain, Period Pain, Migraine Pain and Tension Headache products differed".

I reckon that is terrible. Claiming or implying that the same product specifically targets very different complaints - and charging close to twice the price in the process - is a very cynical, some would say even duplicitous, strategy.

Consumers need to be able to trust the pharmaceutical brands they buy and when a company decides to mislead the public, that faith is clearly eroded. I won't be the only person to now wonder what other salient information is being hidden.

And I still can't shake the image of a man with a sore back rifling through a medicine cabinet and finding only Nurofen for period pain. No Kiwi joker in his right mind would ever sample that brew - but, hey, he may as well have. Since the only meaningful difference was the packaging, those girly tablets would have given him the very comfort he sought. So, how much pain and discomfort has this labelling debacle needlessly caused?

Australian authorities may have only just moved on this but as far back as last year the Herald reported that these supposedly distinct Nurofen products did not have different ingredients.

Additionally, it was discovered that another brand was employing a similar strategy: "Panadol... sells products targeted for back and neck pain relief that contains 500mg of paracetamol - identical to its standard formula."

I checked our medicine cabinet, hoping that it didn't contain any of those Nurofen "site specific" products. Luckily, it didn't. I'd always operated on the basis that you're better off buying a generalist product that would tackle all sorts of pain.

But I can totally understand how someone plagued by a particular complaint may have been inclined to splash out and go for the more specific offering.

In fact, that's exactly what I would have done too. If Nurofen had released a tablet specifically aimed at relieving symptoms of the inevitable annual-5pm-post-Christmas-lunch slump I'd have been an enthusiastic buyer. Now there's another cynical marketing ploy for some opportunistic organisation. You are welcome.