UKC

Hi all I was just wondering what would be the best source of pain relief after a work out?

Why are you in pain after a workout? Are you injured? You should be almost tripping on endorphins as I am after a fast bike ride, not in pain. 

For muscle aches and pains, bronchitis or any other inflammation ibuprofen works well, taken with food.

For longer-term pain paracetamol is a much under-used drug and very good if you take it regularly, which means 1 gm every 5-6 hours. Keep a note of times so you don't forget. 

As long as you don't mind destroying your liver and never, ever, stop taking it or you will get rebound headaches.

Meditation, sleep, yoga, massage, hot/cold baths and showers.

Based on hard won personal experience, don;t even consider using pain relief as a regular thing after work outs.

Is there much evidence of liver damage if you keep to the recommended dosage? You may be thinking of kidney damage - apparently that's been associated with long-term use:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29863746

Well that's weird, I was recommended to take it long term by my GP and my cycling buddy, a physician, when I broke my collar bone, endured 3 months of miserable non-union, had it plated, endured another 4 months of adhesive capsulitis (frozen shoulder) then a capsule release operation and another month of painful physio.... and I didn't get a rebound headache or suffer any long-term liver damage. 

Do you really regularly need pain relief after a workout?! 

Is this the kind of post where later in the thread you come back saying you've found a great website for pain relief with fantastic deals and free delivery...?

Whisky. There is some sketchy evidence of liver damage associated with long term use.

I'll moderate my stance a bit! (Tylenol in the US) https://www.medicinenet.com/tylenol_liver_damage/article.htm. 

Part of the problem is that it is an ingredient in quite a few things - for example I was given a family-pack of percocet post recent surgery. I was surprised to find that it was in there. It's in quite a few non-prescription things here. 

We see rebound headaches mostly in migraine patients - again, it's likely overuse and self-medication. https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/medication-overuse-headache/...

See my gentler stance above! It's likely you were taking it as recommended and not with the all too common view of "this works pretty well, more should be even better!". 

As well as the things that contain it that can induce over-use (a bit of an eye-opener) - https://www.knowyourdose.org/common-medicines/

I'm glad you recovered from your ordeal! 

Ibprufen. Neck a whole load before bed after a brutal wall session and I bounce out of bed next morning after a great night's sleep feeling ten years younger. I take it as an occasional treat, not routinely.

Well I injured my shoulder in March and tried paracetamol and ibuprofen but alcohol was what got me my best nights sleeps! But currently it has got a bit better so I just put up with it.

Anecdotally you may have received benefit from brufen, but in some instances it delays the inflammatory response thus delaying healing. I will dig out some papers.

Nothing. You shouldn’t need it, and it will do you no good - either masking injury and/or hindering adaptation. 

Yeah - I don't really understood why paracetamol is still allowed in so many other things. It's an obvious risk. The bit about the risks in taking paracetamol with alcohol is interesting - I didn't know about that although I've always thought it was likely to be an issue. 

Mrs pneame got sued by a pharmacist who blamed her for his taking boatloads of paracetamol (self medicating and hadn't mentioned it...). He didn't do his liver any good at all. It was thrown out but was a bit traumatic nevertheless. This was ages ago, but it has made us a bit sensitized! 

Facetiously, I regard it as "the perfect drug" - 

Have headache

Take paracetamol.

Headache gets better.

Rebound headache

Take paracetamol.... and so on. You can't lose if you make the stuff. 

I didn't know about the alcohol thing either, although it is likely to be correlated to dosage and duration. 

Quite.  I’d happily take much larger doses of over the counter cocodamol if it didn’t have paracetamol in it....  

Edit: More seriously, the effective and harmful doses of paracetamol aren’t well separated, and I don’t know if it would ever get licensed as a new drug under modern practices.  I don’t tend to take painkillers for anything except when it’s toothache interfering with my sleep, and then OTC ibuprofen+codeine is my go-to.  Along with whisky and 20% benzocaine gel.  It’s the pain relief variant of speedballing.  

I'd understood you had to take ibuprufen for about a week to get the anti-inflammatory effect (a doctor told me). Short term it is just a pain killer.

That's ridiculous... If the person was a pharmacist  then have should surely known better. There must be more to the story of how, like they were a overseas pharmacist that spoke no English, not registered as an actual pharmacist, or working in a non clinical field. Still no excuse really.

As far as I’m aware and I’m no pharmacist but work in the health profession, anti inflammatories vary between brand in taking a day to  a week to have effect. They prevent the release of prostaglandins that cause the inflammatory soup. I’m pretty sure they have no other pain relieving effect used solo.

Codeine and paracetamol reduce pain in a totally different way by blocking nociception.

I was under the impression that inflammation was not ever regarded as a good thing.

Well, Ibuprufen is certainly advertised and sold as a pain killer. If it's not, it certainly has a wondeful placebo effect on me!

Because inflammation causes pain?

Have I understood what you are saying correctly? I could buy some Nurofen and some Tesco own brand and one of them might act on the inflammation right away and the other night do nothing for a week?

I don't think that's brand I think that's type of NSAID i.e. ibuprofen, naproxen, etc. 

Inflammation is a necessary part of the body's healing response, it's when it becomes chronic or disproportionate that it's a problem.

This reliance on medicines after a workout is very disturbing. I recently had a total hip replacement and was happily surprised to see just how strict they were about my drug regime after I left hospital: I was given strict regime of nothing more than codeine, ibuprufen and paracetamol. And they wanted me to drop them, as fast as possible, in that order, i.e. codeine first. Which I dropped after about 10 days (and the Ibuprufen, which strangely enough, has never done anything for me, totally ineffective). I kept taking the paracetamol - which they said was the least harmful - for about 5 weeks, which was the time I remained in some pain. This fitted well with my own mindset of never taking any pills unless absolutely necessary. (I had to keep taking the paracetamol as long as the pain kept me awake at night without it).

No - Nurofen and Tesco Ibuprofen contain the same stuff and work in exactly the same way. There may be some placebo effect if you are paying more and for the silver box, but it is still the same stuff working in the same way. 

Out of interest, paracetamol is by far the safest (at normal doses) drugs mentioned in the thread. If the normal dose is stuck to, it has remarkably few side effects compared to ibuprofen and the other NSAIDs. The downside is that in overdose (typically above 10g) it can be very fatal and in a very slow and painful way as liver is irreversibly damaged. The toxic dose is not much more than double the normal dose, so paracetamol being in lots of things then becomes a very serious risk if people take multiple things. 

Yeah that was the original situation. He posted another thread directly afterwards advertising CBD oil which I reported (likely alongside others) and was swiftly deleted - so then we were left with this which granted has turned into an interesting discussion. Who says bots don't have their uses? 

  It is advertised as a pain killer and an anti-inflammatory. Having read this thread I asked the pharmacist in Boots yesterday who told me that it takes about three days (three tablets per day) for the anti-inflammatory effect to kick in .