"Stormin Mormon" wrote in
:

Motrin IB isn't doing much good for me, tonight. The little
brown generic ibuprophen also don't do much good.

Aleve seems to help, generic naproxyn is useless.

Generic acetaminophen seems to help. Arthritis strength
generic acetaminophen seems to help.

Wish I could find a pill that's cheap, and relieves pain.

This may be more than you want ... And you didn't say what kind of pain.

Acetaminophen is in a class by itself. It's not really known how it
works.

NSAIDS all work by inhibiting cyclooxygenase enzymes, of which there are
2 kinds - COX-1 and COX-2.

COX-1 is irreversibly killed by aspirin. Your cells need to make new
protein COX-1 to get its products again. That's why low-dose aspirin
prevents platelet aggregation and in doing so reduces the risk of heart
attacks and strokes, which are in part associated with thromboxane
formation, mainly from COX-1.
There has been a lot of talk in the literature of "aspirin resistance",
but now there are only 3 known kinds of aspirin-resistance: 1) Failure
to take the aspirin (i.e. patients forgot they didn't take the pills or
they lied about it). 2) There is an absorption problem in the upper
intestines (this is rare). 3) There is a systemic problem whereby
platelet turnover is greatly increased (normally platelets live ~6 days,
then die). Other cells can make the same things that platelets make in
great abundance, so sometimes they take over and cause problems.

Most other NSAIDS are reversible inhibitors of the COX's with different
affinities for either one. That means 2 things. A) COX-2 is associated
with making products that are good for you (e.g. prostacyclin inhibits
platelets). So inhibiting COX-2 more than COX-1 may not be so good. It
is thought that COX-2 inhibition was part of the problem with Vioxx, but
in my expert and not humble opinion this doesn't explain everything about
Vioxx. B) If you take ibuprofen (an example of a reversible COX
inhibitor) for pain, then take aspirin for your heart, you may be doing
things wrong. To help against heart disease, you should be taking
aspirin 1 hour before ibuprofen and let more than 6 hours pass after
taking ibuprofen before taking aspirin. That's because you need to let
the ibuprofen get flushed out of your system sothe COX molecule is free
of it, because if the ibuprofen is sitting on the protein when aspirin
needs to get there, the aspirin will just pass by without doing anything.

NOTE that the above is for getting effective against heart disease, not
effective against pain. Aspirin needs much bigger doses against pain as
against heart problems.

When I had a lot of pain (the chronic kind) I got a prescription for
Ultracet http://www.drugs.com/ultracet.html. That helped me. It is a
step below the real opioids ...

--
Best regards
Han
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