People know surprisingly little about common pain-killers

• Jun 4, 2021 • by Paul Ingraham
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Weekly nuggets of pain science news and insight, usually 100-300 words, with the occasional longer post. The blog is the “director’s commentary” on the core content of PainScience.com: a library of major articles and books about common painful problems and popular treatments. See the blog archives or updates for the whole site.

Example: Many people know that some are hard on the guts (“gut burners”), but few know which ones… or that it makes no difference what you eat or drink with them … let alone why!

Another common example: Few people know which of the non-prescription pain-killers is one of the safest meds in existence… or the caveat that it’s only super safe at recommended dosages… but in overdose it flips to dangerous… and there are “hidden” doses in many products! Yikes. 😬

So I wrote a guide, with lots of interesting pain-killer tips ‘n’ science: The Science of Pain-Killers: A user’s guide to over-the-counter analgesics like acetaminophen, ibuprofen, and more.

This was cobbled together from many bits and pieces cobbled together over many years for other articles. I thought having most of the pieces already would make it “easy.” Ha! Obviously, converting it into a readable and organized piece was plenty of work — possibly even harder than starting from scratch.