Oh Good, People Are Poaching Chicken In NyQuil
A cold remedy is being taken to a whole new level, which isn't necessarily a good thing.
For every interesting and useful TikTok trick we've learned in the kitchen, there's at least 10 cursed ones, like in the case of this frozen honey trick that gave people diarrhea. Just when you thought it couldn't get much worse, TikTok users are now showing themselves working on an unconventional cold treatment—poaching chicken in NyQuil, Mic reports. The internet is a hazardous place.
A user with the best name ever, @systemofaclown69, posted two videos showing themselves creating the dish by opening up a package of chicken, then poaching it in a saucepan with NyQuil. A second video shows the user messing with the chicken in the pan with some tongs, and a third video shows a person inhaling the vapors from the boiling NyQuil.
It's clear that this is more of a stunt than something people actually do to help with a pesky cold, but in case you were considering this, please don't. Aaron Hartman is a physician in Richmond, Virginia, who is also an assistant clinical professor of family medicine at Virginia Commonwealth University, lists off multiple reasons not to do this.
First, he says, "When you cook cough medicine like NyQuil, however, you boil off the water and alcohol in it, leaving the chicken saturated with a super concentrated amount of drugs in the meat. If you ate one of those cutlets completely cooked, it'd be as if you're actually consuming a quarter to half a bottle of NyQuil." Holy crap!
Oh yeah, and the huffing thing is also a terrible idea. Hartman continues, "By cooking a medicine with multiple drugs in it on a stove top, you've aerosolized it and are most likely inhaling it." That's one thing, but he also said that applying heat to a drug can also change its composition, so there's no telling what you'd actually be taking into your lungs.
"Inhaled, these medicines also enter your bloodstream really quickly and are not going past your liver for detoxification," he said. "The effects can be quite bad depending on how much you inhale." I'm not your parent, but I can stand in the corner over here with my hands on my hips, wiggling my finger at you. Don't cook with cough medicine, you hear me?