A combination of Tylenol and Advil worked just as well as opioids for relief of pain in trials

[DadsBoyfriend]

If I have to, I'd take two Tylenol rather than include Advil. I'm more irrationally paranoid about increasing the risk of stroke than risking liver damage.

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Yes sir. I am in the same boat.

 

[Dashful]

That's what they gave me mostly after my surgery last September where they cut my jaw and chin bones and put screws in 6 different places. And it worked well enough that I didn't really need anything else.

edit: Well except antibiotics to prevent infections.

 

[Ponn]

Emerson, your post aligns with the main narrative pushed by the media, so I understand why you'd believe it, but the reporting on the issue has been abysmal.

This statement is a bit hard to parse. First, cancer is not the only condition that can put people in terrible pain. Far from it. Secondly, opioids absolutely do work for the pain of those conditions, and they can be taken safely, and the vast majority do.

Opioid prescriptions are not the main problem, in fact they only a very small part, only about 4.5%. The vast majority of opioid related deaths are the result of either people mixing opioids with other drugs, which you can't do safely in a lot of cases, or as a result of using illegal street versions which contain fentanyl which is a hundred times stronger than other opioids and 50 times stronger than heroin, or even carfentanyl which if I recall correctly is ten times stronger than that. Since the illegal versions aren't measured as strictly as the prescription ones, they're dangerous and easy to overdose on.
http://reason.com/archives/2016/05/18/opioid-epidemic-myths

Opioid prescriptions are not actually dangerous to take long-term:

The vast majority taking opioid prescriptions are not abusing them:


The drug companies absolutely should not have tried to act like they had no risk of addiction at all, but now we're swinging back in the opposite direction and overreacting. They are not always addicting.


It's not as real as it seems because of incorrect methodology. I suggest you read the criticism section on wikipedia about opioid-induced hyperalgesia. With proper methodology, it's not really a problem at all.

Even opioid tolerance isn't as much of a problem as people fear because you can simply rotate them.

I personally have a family member who's been taking prescription opioids safely for years for a condition with no cure. She didn't get addicted. Doesn't even get high. Opioids absolutely can work, and safely, but because of the hysteria the media is whipping up about them, important details which reveal the real sources of the problem are ignored.

We're basically freaking out about a slowly dripping pipe (the small number of problem doctors) when there's a gushing pipe on the other side of the room (street drugs, lack of knowledge about the stuff you can't mix them with and the reasons why people are turning to drugs in the first place, like hopelessness).

The terrible reporting is causing people to overreact and recently caused an across-the-board reduction of pain meds. My family member only gets a fifth of what she got before for no good reason at all, as they already put patients through regular checks to make sure they aren't abusing them. It's like they decided to reduce the speed limit to 10 mph everywhere because some people decide to speed and cause crashes. They're also not as easy to get as people think from almost all doctors, as they're generally paranoid about prescribing them and some pharmacies won't even fill prescriptions for them anymore.

The overreaction is causing real suffering to a ton of people who can't get adequate pain relief. People are killing themselves because they just can't take it anymore, which is obviously worse than the other risks, which are again far smaller than commonly believed. We need to get the word out that they absolutely can be taken safely. One opioid was even reformulated to make it resistant to abuse, so what's the point of clamping down on that too?

In 2015, opioid deaths were above 33,000. Yet no one talks about the approximately 16,500 people who died in 2015 from NSAIDs, or the 400,000 who died from cigarettes in the US, and millions more around the world.

The opioid epidemic is absolutely a problem, but it's not prescriptions. We need to calm down and look at the true sources and address them, though I know that the systemic societal issues driving people to opioids in the first place are going to be very difficult to fix and keeping out the illegal drugs is impossible, but decriminalizing personal use to make it easier for people to get treatment for their addictions would be a great start.

TLDR: Prescription opioids are not the problem, illegal ones and the reasons people are turning to them to the first place are, and the overreaction is causing a lot of pain patients to suffer needlessly.

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Thank you for this post. The hysteria being whipped up over opioids is getting out of hand, unfocused and spreading misinformation. And people that really need medications are being effected by it. I've been trying for a year now to help my mom get her 1 lortab a day rx but doctors are so scared to write rxs now they want her to take 8 ibuprofen a day instead. Now she has stomach issues and it's been shown to effect the heart. She used to be able to keep busy during the day and do some basic house stuff and cooking but now most days she can barely get out of bed. It's fucking nuts.

 

[Joeytj]

Yeah, a lot of the reactions here to the study proves that Americans and their pain-free obsession is part of what caused the opioid crisis, not just the immorality of drug manufacturers.

I live on the Mexican side of the U.S.-Mexico border, and doctors always tell me that Americans are always begging to be put under total anaesthesia for procedures that don't really need it at all.

I've never understood why in American movies, TV, social media and anecdotally, people are always high after "coming from the dentist". I've never met anyone like that and I've gotten two wisdom tooth pulled at the same time with just local anesthesia. Kind of scary being awake for all of it, but that's how it is and there was no real pain.

Almost all major pharmacies here in Mexico now have a doctor on hand for free or very cheap consultations for non-life threatening care, and they always say that Americans too often cross the border each day and come in for quick drug fixes for weight-loss and anxiety, with no diagnosis whatsoever.

 

[Ponn]

mistake double post

 

[parrotbeak]

I like combining Percocet and Vicodin better.

 

[maxx720]

Some people in here are talking about this like "well maybe, but not for chronic pain."
Opioid-induced hyperalgesia and central sensitization are a real thing. At bare minimum in the long term you get increasing dependence, increasing dose tolerance and decreasing effectiveness eventually leading to just as much pain as the patient started with despite taking enough narcotics to kill a large animal.

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[bunbun777]

Throw in a puff of the chronic and you got yourself a relieving stew.

 

[VERSAT1L]

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/08/well/live/alternatives-to-opioids-for-pain-relief.html?module=WatchingPortal&region=c-column-middle-span-region&pgType=Homepage&action=click&mediaId=thumb_square&state=standard&contentPlacement=11&version=internal&contentCollection=www.nytimes.com&contentId=https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/08/well/live/alternatives-to-opioids-for-pain-relief.html&eventName=Watching-article-click

I swear I've heard people doing this before, not for emergency care, but combining two of the most common OTC pain relief drugs doesn't sound uncommon as a home remedy of sorts. It's almost the Dragon Quest alchemy pot lol. Looks like it's rather effective in emergency room care.

With the opiate crisis being so widespread it's nice to that alternatives are developing.

Disclaimer: Do not try this, kids.

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Doesn't make sense. What does the opiate crisis have anything to do with post-surgery pain?

 

[Ponn]

Throw in a puff of the chronic and you got yourself a relieving stew.

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Good luck with that. We passed medical marijuana a year ago in Florida but the police and state government have been doing everything in their power to keep it from happening. They just outlawed medical marijuana shops in parts around here even.

 

[Nothing Loud]

Didn't do shit when I got my hip replacement. Needed the hardcore shit for a week. Tylenol wasn't cutting it. Was like water.


Weed works better. Put the shit in a pill and solve the opioid epidemic.

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Does it? My friend in med school shared this with me from his database of med info. We should definitely study its pain effects more but I'm not sure how well understood it is for pain relief yet

 

[parrotbeak]

I could kinda believe this for arm and leg injuries. I sprain stuff all the time and don't even take anything. Right now I've got a strained ham and hip and I'm just limping through it.

When I had my disc injury the doctor first gave me strong doses of Naproxin and Tylenol, and they didn't do anything for the sharp debilitating pain. This is pain that would hit when I moved wrong and would literally make me see colors and nearly make me fall down. Then I was given 25 vics at a time and would need about 2-3 off the bat when I had no tolerance to keep from having that shocking pain. The vics didn't stop me from being in constant lower levels of pain but I wouldn't get the super sharp shocking pain. Maybe weed might have helped but I had to go to work so couldn't be illegally high (people only seemed envious when they found out I had opiates but they are really hard to concentrate on, and i would forget conversations entirely).

I can't really comment post-surgery because my dumb regular doc had delayed real treatment for so long, and then when he realized i was really injured to make up for it gave me all the oxy I wanted, so by the time i had surgery I was taking tons of oxy. Then post-surgery my surgeon took that away and gave me 50 percs to last 2 weeks, so my post-surgery was more opiate withdrawal than anything else. The really shocking post-surgery pain was only for a couple of weeks anyway.