So yall are just talking about baby meds for minor headaches. I'm up on that prescription grade headache medication for my debilitating migraines, and I can not take it more than a few times a month without doing irreparable damage to my kidneys and liver. Sometimes, dealing with headache pain is the healthier option.
My medication is just for managing the pain/alleviating symptoms. I have seen neurologists and have been thoroughly examined.
My migraines are caused by having received multiple traumatic brain injuries due to blunt force trauma and concussive shock waves from being blown up while deployed overseas in active combat. Unfortunately, nothing much can be done about this accept for trying to manage the pain.
The good news is that I seem to be getting them much less frequently than I used to, so maybe my brain is attempting to heal itself. I used to get a migraine just about once a week. Now it's only about once every other month.
Pain is healthy in so far that it indicates injury or sickness. It helps to tell you to give your body more rest. But if pain is chronic or gives you stress even during rest you do need medication
Pain is not always an indicator of injury or sickness, such as OP's migraines or people with nerve disorders. There are many causes of pain, including unknown causes.
Boo hoo, someone couldn't go 10 minutes without making something all about them. Of fucking course this is talking about normal headaches and not chronic migraines you fucking imbecile. Do you think someone's gonna be recommending hard medication as a daily snack or something? Yeah, we all know sometimes you can't pop drugs like it's fucking candy. But you're not really here to inform, you're here to say, "look at me, everybody, I'm the 1 in 1000 people this advice doesn't apply to, aren't I so fucking special??"
Opiates are not medically indicated for migraines.
Triptans are.
So are injections of Ajovy.
This person is not talking about taking opiates. They are talking about medications that suck to take, but reduce the electrical storm of a migraine in the brain.
Water, apple, handful of nuts, Walk around for at least 15 minutes. If a headache isn't on the way out then maybe try to shift the problem to your liver with some ibuprofen or Tylenol but it shouldn't be the first thing people try.
And just eat in general. My goodness sometimes I'm so surprised, I'll be feeling terrible (usual for me) and I'll realize I haven't eaten in a long time and take like one bite of something and instantly my headache and possibly fatigue are significantly better.
Most headaches are caused by blood sugar imbalance, which in turn are often caused by changes in diet or sleep habits, and/or dehydration. If the meals help then yours may tend to be from low blood sugar.
It's almost guaranteed that it's mainly because of dehydration. SO MANY people these days are constantly dehydrated (myself included, though I'm trying) because they're drinking nothing but sodas, coffees and teas.
If everyone could drink at least 2 liters of water a day, they'd feel much better.
If you have regular headaches, see a doctor. Could be hay fever or other allergies for example and there's stuff that works much better for that than painkillers.
Yeah even OTC drugs aren't necessarily safe to take daily and indefinitely. Depending on the medication, you can end up with things like stomach ulcers or even liver damage. Once in a while is fine, but if you're needing to take something daily, you might want to get checked out and/or try some sort of other methods.
Usually it's tension headaches. The solution to that isn't meds, either, but chilling the fuck out and better posture. Yoga, callisthenics, actually pretty much any kind of sport should help. In acute cases, try a hot bath. Or some good Indica wait no that'd be meds. Valerian is probably as far as you should go, it's not a downer as such but makes it harder to forget that chilling out is an option, needs a regular schedule though if you're wired up. Eat healthy. Avoid hangovers by not getting drunk. Make sure your sleep quality is good. You know, basic shit.
just make sure to read the information slip, and at least here in sweden the recommendation is to not treat headaches with pain relievers more than 9 days per month or it can just cause more headaches.
what i go with is just doing what i can to handle the headache/migraine without medicine, but feel 0 guilt about popping a pill if needed. Especially if i'm going somewhere or have something at home i want to actually enjoy i'll not hesitate to medicate.
Excuse me I would rather not build up resistance to painkillers and then be screwed once I REALLY need painkillers.
The headache sucks, but it's not wisdom tooth level pain.
Edit: I'm not taking about opioids or stuff. I'm talking about simple over the counter meds that aren't addictive but you can still build up resistance to. I already managed to have that happen and have one type become useless
Absolutely, the risks of addiction are monumentally different and should not be conflated. That said, my sister definitely did get addicted to Advil in her teens and had to go through withdrawal. On the other hand, I haven't had an Advil in over ten years and in that time have only experienced a handful of headaches, each only lasting a few minutes. Chances are, I'm just very lucky. But there's also a good chance that if I resorted to Advil before meditation and hydration, my luck would run out more frequently. YMMV.
Pain is usually a message, often that message is "This body part is damaged, try to modify how you are moving to not aggravate the wound" In those instances I dont actually WANT to remove the pain because its helping me heal faster and correctly. When its bedtime and its stopping me from sleeping? THEN I'll take some pain meds, as lack of sleep is also bad for my health
It would be nice if it was that simple for everyone, but it isn't. Migraines especially are debilitating for me and I will 100% take my pills over trying to ride the pain.
Sometimes, I know why I have a headache, but most of the time, it pops up for no apparent reason. Always had been since I was 10 years old. So fuck that noise, after a certain threshold, I take ibuprofen and acetaminophen instead of suffering for hours.
Oh yeah, I'm definitely not arguing against pain meds for when its extreme or not helpful, the human body isnt perfect, and our body systems dont work with computer like precision. I'm also pretty sure I have a dulled sense of pain.
I just saw a doctor about this, turns out chronic headaches are not normal. It turned out I have an allergy giving me congestion even though I’m breathing normally but enough to induce pressure on my head. Go see a doctor if you’re having daily headaches.
have you tried different kinds? apparently it really varies what the standard pain reliever is depending on where you go, i believe what i've always taken is ibuprofen here in sweden and that is basically a miracle pill that dissolves any sort of pain and cold symptoms within half an hour for me.
What? Whenever I've needed pain relief enough where I've been to the doctor, they tell me to use both ibuprofen and paracetamol, as they have different active ingredients, and that precisely because of that it's perfectly fine. They stress very much to not take too much of one at a time though.
There is difference between the two as they are two completely seperate things.
I am a disability advocate, and I took many courses in college on this subject while getting my doctorate.
Drug dependence is typically defined as what causes tolerance and withdrawal. The physical effects of the need of medicine. Everything from diabetes meds, like insulin, to blood pressure medicine, to even cold medicine could be in that category.
It's why a person shouldn't use nose spray but for 2–3 days as you become dependent on it, causing you to need to consume it to be able to breathe out of your nose. (FYI: It's a VERY bad idea to become dependent on nose spray as it SUCKS for a few days getting off of it.)
Addiction is a mental component. It is a neurological state of being. Some things are more addictive than others, with things that change the neurological state being more addictive than those that don't.
For example, sex, roller coasters, and YouTube shorts can affect your brain chemistry in the same way that METH can!
TL;DR - Addiction is a neurological condition, while dependence is when a body depends on a substance medicinally.
The number of people who suffer horrifically because of the misconceptions of addiction VS dependence is sickening.
We NEED to remove this stigma of taking proper medication to increase the quality of life of the disabled.
Yes to pain relief, but what about cold/flu medication? All they do is restrain the symptoms (like a running nose, coughing up phlegm, fever) which are your body's attempts at fighting the virus. Shouldn't that make you sick for longer because your body can't fight as well? I'm sure my understanding of the biological processes is severely lacking.
Yep. I usually take NyQuil before bed if I have a bad cold just to get me through the night. The only other thing that sometimes, but often doesn't, work for a cold is Mucinex.
Shouldn’t that make you sick for longer because your body can’t fight as well?
Short answer: It's not necessarily true for most over the counter medication, with some exceptions.
Your body should have no trouble creating antibodies to fight off the infection because those drugs don't act on white blood cells. And at around the three-to-four-day mark, the infection is almost guaranteed to go away on its own when the adaptive immune response kicks in.
Interestingly enough, most of the cold symptoms (except for fever) are part of the viral strategy to help it spread. In a weird way, the infectious agent kicks up your primary immune response to do its bidding.
What's not recommended are fever-reducing medications. This is because elevating body temperature is your body's way of reducing growth rates of most microorganisms and also speed up its own attack and alerts its own defenses. Reducing that temperature has a chance of increasing viral shedding. Ironically enough, this list of antipyrietic drugs includes Aspirin and paracetamol which are also used for pain relief. lol
My personal take is that it doesn't matter much unless you're overly concerned about being sick for--I'm guessing--half a day to a day longer with subsiding symptoms, and are overly worried about increasing the average rates of infections by a marginal amount.
(Full disclosure: I'm not a medical doctor but a former pharmacologist.)
I've read there is a lot of contention among doctors of whether you should fight a fever or not, with a lot of literature for and against it. My intuition is that, like most symptoms, it is probably best to live with it as best you can without taking meds to reducing it. But if it is causing you to have issues doing activities that will help you recover like sleeping, eating, etc, then to treat it.
Your body's responses are overkill/unnecessary in a lot of cases. Like inflammation, a lot of that is so your skin will swell up near a cut so not as much dirt gets in it, but if you're keeping it clean/bandaged that's probably counterproductive. A runny nose, isn't that just the virus tricking you into becoming more contagious? A fever, could be useful if it's a virus that can do serious damage before your immune system can ramp up enough to handle it, but if it's a less dangerous one that's probably just self damage.
A headache has many causes one of them I found is the food you eat for example my mom eat only meat because if she eats anything else she feels like dying
I heard some doctor say during a podcast that these medicines are really bad for your microbiome. Apparently this is still not common knowledge in the medical science and the effects may be much more devistating than once thought.
No expert, but my take on this is that medicines work because they resemble the chemicals your body already makes itself. Better not interfere with a finely balanced immune system in which pain is an essential signal for the body to cope with infections and injuries. It might be more comforting to take a pill against something but I'm afraid it messes up the immune system too much, better to avoid that as much as possible. Works fine for me.
Yes and no: address the cause of the pain and the pain itself. For example if you're hung over then drink a load of water and eat some food, but have some ibuprofen too. Medical professionals tell you to do this.