Why wouldn’t a medication with both an expectorant and a cough suppressant cancel each other out?
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Those do entirely different things – expectorants make it so lung mucus is more fluid/more of it is produced. Cough suppressant prevents cough reflex causing you to cough when bronchi or trachea are irritated. Taking both means there’s no cough to irritate bronchi further, but mucus can flow upward helping clear the airways
If it makes you feel any better, most OTC expectorants and cough suppressants don’t work very well, anyway, so there’s not much cancelling going on of anything. Drinking more water’s probably as good or better than hitting the Robitussin for thinning mucus.
But theoretically, you’d cough less but get out more goo when you did because you’d thinned it out a bit. You don’t have to pound the ketchup bottle as hard if the ketchup’s thinner.
Expectorants are intended to make mucus thinner and easier to cough up.
Cough suppressants are intended to stop you coughing, be causing coughing can be irritating.
Cough suppressants are a bad idea generally, as coughing is an essential part of keeping the lungs clear especially when there is an infection.
That said, it doesn’t really matter. There are no readily available Expectorants and cough suppressants which actually work.
Expectorants as a general rule don’t work at all. Cough suppressants like morphine and heroin are avaialable but generally only used for terminal cases.
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