For sleep aids this is often not the case. I'm in my early 50s and tried Doxylamine Succinate 2 years ago for the first time - an innocent Costco "Sleep Aid".
I was beyond groggy - quite nonfunctional - until the following afternoon and would not have trusted myself with operating a car even then.
Doxylamine succinate is a fairly powerful antihistamine. I only take it when I'm sick, and I take a half -dose. It has closer to a 12-hour half life, which is why you felt so groggy. I have to basically take it at 7pm if I want to be operational by 10am the following day.
You wouldn’t, if you remembered that medically speaking, younger people “needing” melatonin pills has been pretty fringe until very recently, and the number of young people who need it is still comparatively small.
You can find smaller pills. But you might have to try several chains or order online to get them.
It's been the standard recommendation for dealing with jetlag in the last 15-20 years. And usually people who regularly experience jetlag due to repeated international professional trips are not elderly.
Last time I was in the US the lowest dose melatonin gummies I could find in a CVS were 1mg — kids gummies.
That's more than 3x the actual recommended dose for an average adult based on the research others have shared in this thread. So no, they're not starting from a sensible starting point.
Were they packaged as kid gummies or are you presuming that gummies = kids? Because that hasn’t been the case for a long time. Those vitamin D gummies I buy because I will take them instead of might take them consistently, are not child doses either. They’re marketing gummies to adults here.
There is a rumour that the high doses are because the correct dose was under patent.
I can only find that in a comment here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/07/10/melatonin-much-more-th... but I could have sworn it was in the main article when I first read it. (If so that makes it less likely, because the author revises his articles for correctness)
That (albeit long) article is worth reading. For example, it explains that melatonin is a phase signal, so being saturated with too much melatonin actually makes the signal less clear (as well as potentially causing other issues).
That's not a "rumour", it's conspiracy theory. Because everything is a conspiracy theory now.
No, the dosage is not patented. It doesn't even make sense. How would it work? "Oh, 0.5mg is patented, so let's put 1mg in the tablets and never sell 0.5mg".
I can get all kinds of dosages from the pharmacy. However, most of what they stock is "too high", probably because there's very little research/wisdom/knowledge around the supplement.
You could actually look at the sources before dismissing them as a conspiracy theory. It took less than 2 seconds to click through to the patent, of which the very first claim is:
- 1. A method of reducing the period before the onset of sleep in an individual comprising administering to the individual a single dose of melatonin of less than 1 mg, said single dose effective to raise the peak plasma level of melatonin in the individual to within physiological nocturnal levels of normal untreated individuals.
