I would like to stop hurting now, please.

[baratron]

I took painkillers an hour ago. They are failing to kill pain. Ouch.

I've been taking a painkiller called Veganin for years. It's the only thing I've ever found that touches period pain. It used to be a combination of paracetamol, codeine and aspirin - but they recently changed the formulation, and now it's just paracetamol and codeine with caffeine. Which I can't use. Great. So I just took Boots' own brand paracetamol and codeine, and it's doing nothing.

Comments

[redbird]

can you add an aspirin tablet to the mix?

[baratron.livejournal.com]

Someone else already suggested that, but it's a good idea nonetheless :) The advice I got from a chronic pain list some time ago was that you can mix painkillers of different types, but never painkillers of the same type. Basically, they divide into three broad classes: paracetamol-based ones (I think US people call this acetomenophen), aspirin-based ones (aspirin and ibuprofen) and opiates (codeine and morphine and so on). What you should do is read the packaging carefully and then stagger the doses of the different drug classes. Most painkillers must be taken with a minimum interval of 4 hours between doses. So what you do is take the paracetamol-based ones at hours x, x+4 and x+8 and the aspirin-based ones at hours x+2, x+6 and x+10. This helps to keep a fairly constant dosage of the drugs in your bloodstream, and helps to avoid that awful period when the previous dose has worn off but the next one hasn't started working yet (or worse, it's too early to take the next one).

You have to really know what you're doing to do this, because even small amounts of overdose can cause serious long-term effects. You also have to make sure that the tablets you have fall into different drug classes. It should only be done as a temporary measure during periods of extreme pain when even the recommended dose on a painkiller isn't touching your pain. But it's ideal for something like period pain that's only one or two days per month.