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Hello, I'm Emma Barnett. For most of my career, I've been on live radio, and I love it.

But I've always wondered, what if we'd had more time? How much deeper does the story go?

I remember having this very sharp thought that what you do right now, this is it.

This defines your life.

I'm ready to talk and ready to listen.

I'm insulted by how little the medical community is ever bothered with this.

Ready to talk with me, Emma Barnard, is my new podcast.

Listen on BBC Sounds.

Hello, I'm Greg Foote and welcome to Slice Bread, the BBC Radio 4 show that investigates

the Wonder Products promising to make you happier, healthier or greener. Each episode, we

follow the crumbs of evidence to find out if one of your suggested wonder products is indeed the best thing since sliced bread or marketing BS. And today's suggestion comes from Sally Parkin from Cumbria. Welcome to the studio, Sally. Hello. How are you? I'm actually very well now, unlike when I first got in touch with you. Well, I thought that because at this point, I'd normally ask you to tell us the wonder product that you'd like us to investigate. But yes, let's do things slightly differently this time. Let's play in the voice note that you were originally sent to our WhatsApp number 07-543-306-807.

Hello, Greg. I want to know about cough mixture. I'm just finishing up chesty coughs, which doesn't seem to have done very much at all.

And I've looked in the pharmacy and there's loads of different cough mixtures for all different

kinds of things. Do any of them actually work? Or would I be just as well with some honey and lemon?

Thank you. Sound a little different there, Sally. Yeah, I was a summer cold, so I was feeling very sorry for myself. Well, thank you for getting in touch in the middle of the cold. And we're recording this towards the end of October. Offices around the UK are started to be filled with a cacophony of coughs. So I feel tis the season. But you're doing all right at the moment? No cough's caught. I am fine. My husband, however, has been keeping me awake with a chesty cough.

You mentioned the medicine in your voice note. You don't think it did very much? No. Was it a new bottle? No, I have to admit, it was from when my children were younger who were now teenagers. So I don't know, does it lose its efficacy over time? I don't

know. Good question. I mean, I think a lot of people have, in the bathroom cabinet normally, at the

back, a few bottles of cough syrup stuck to the surface or with a very sticky lid. And you said you'd

noticed all the other products in the pharmacy. What type of treatments have you seen? All sorts. There are chesty coughs, dry coughs, ones for night time, then the lozenges.

I'm always quite partial to the ones that you suck and then they've got the liquid in the middle.

I'd have those like a sweetie really.

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