Spray it ain’t so!
It’s bad enough you’re brushing your teeth all wrong — now it turns out you’ve also been abusing your nasal spray.
“I was yesterday years old when I learned there was a wrong way to use [nasal spray] Flonase,” content creator Amber Guttilla declared in a recent viral TikTok. “I’ve been doing it wrong for 30 years.”
It seems sort of natural to shove it into your nostril upright and try to cram it in as deep as possible — but, apparently, this is not the way.
According to Guttilla’s doctor, you’ll want to angle the spray towards the corner of your eye. We nosed around and found out why.
“We do like to angle all nose sprays slightly toward the eye,” Dr. Robert Sporter, an allergist at ENT and Allergy Associates in Manhattan, told The Post. “We don’t want to spray the septum, which is the middle part of the nose.”
That’s because you want the spray to hit your turbinates — the fleshy structures along the sides of your nasal passage — as “that’s where all the inflamed tissues are,” he explained.
When it comes to allergy relief, spraying your septum is pretty much useless — and it could even have some unpleasant side effects.
“That’s actually where a lot of blood vessels are, so sometimes that makes you more prone to uncommon side effects, such as bleeding from steroid sprays or dryness from antihistamine sprays,” Sporter said.
The second big boo-boo many people make is snorting it like their lives depend on it.
“Definitely good to take a light sniff, not a big breath or snort,” he said. “If you take a big breath, you’re just going to suck all of the medicine to the throat where it does no good. It has to work in the nose.”
One move Guttilla shows in the video is pulling her cheek slightly to the side to open the nasal passage, which Sporter says might have some benefits but isn’t crucial.
“I’m not sure pulling the cheek back is necessary for most patients, but it certainly wouldn’t hurt,” he said. “It may open up the nasal passage a bit more if it’s tight.”
The bad news, according to Sporter, is that “the best time to start a nose spray for spring was last week.” If you blew it, the good news is that “the second best time is now!”
One last thing to keep in mind: he recommends not letting yourself get hooked on those fast-acting decongestant sprays.
“Definitely avoid decongestant sprays such as oxymetazoline or phenylephrine,” he advised. “They feel great in the moment but your nose gets used to them if used for more than a few days in a row, causing much bigger problems.”
Stick to nasal steroid sprays like Flonase — but use them regularly.
“It’s much better to use a nasal steroid spray, but remember they need to be used consistently to work,” he said.
Now you nose.
