Benzonatate Pharmacology Podcast

Real Life Pharmacology - Pharmacology Education for Health Care Professionals

Eric Christianson, PharmD; Pharmacology Expert and Clinical Pharmacist

Education, Health & Fitness, Medicine

5 • 716 Ratings

🗓️ 15 May 2025

⏱️ 10 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

On this episode, I discuss benzonatate pharmacology, adverse reactions, and much more.

Tessalon Pearls (benzonatate) are a non-narcotic antitussive commonly prescribed to relieve dry, non-productive coughs.

Benzonatate acts by numbing stretch receptors in the respiratory tract, lungs, and pleura, which helps suppress the cough reflex at its source. Unlike opioid-based cough suppressants, it doesn’t work in the brain’s cough center.

The usual adult dose is 100 to 200 mg taken orally three times a day as needed, with a maximum daily dose of 600 mg.

One of the most critical points is that the capsules must be swallowed whole. Chewing, sucking, or crushing them can cause numbness in the mouth and throat, leading to a risk of choking or aspiration.

There are no major drug interactions associated with benzonatate.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, all, welcome back to the real-life pharmacology podcast. I'm your host, pharmacist, Eric Christensen.
0:05.7	Thank you so much for listening today. Today, I've got the drug benzonotate. Brand name is Teselon Pearls.
0:13.0	Before we get to that, I just want to remind you if you're new to the podcast and listening to it.
0:18.3	We've got well over 350 episodes at this point, basically 100 hours of educational content.
0:26.9	So all that's free and available.
0:29.5	You can find it on iTunes, Spotify, wherever you listen to podcasts.
0:32.5	You can also find all these episodes at the Real-life pharmacology podcast.com.
0:38.8	So go check that out.
0:42.1	Yeah, help get some education, free education, and take advantage of that.
0:45.9	And share us with friends, colleagues, classmates, and so on and so forth.
0:49.1	So with that said, let's get into the drug of the day.
0:53.5	And that has been zonotate.
0:55.6	Brand name is Teslon Pearls, as I mentioned.
0:58.3	This is considered an antitussive medication.
1:02.7	Fancy name for basically meaning that we're trying to treat and suppress a cough.
1:09.4	So first off, starting with cough, whenever I think of cough, I typically think of
1:16.3	medical conditions that are going on that are usually going to be associated with that cough.
1:22.9	And obviously this is something that's going to be diagnosed by a provider, but it could be infection,
1:29.0	it could be allergy-related, asthma, COPD, those respiratory diseases, GERD, could be various
1:37.2	types of lung cancers. So these can all be potential contributors to cough, certainly, and in any
1:43.6	kind of differential diagnosis,
1:45.3	that's what a clinician is going to do, is take a look at that and make sure that we know
	...

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