I discovered something tonight that had me slightly puzzled. As some of you already know I take morphine and oxycodone for chronic pain. Recently I’ve been having some tooth pain and it turns out I need a root canal (joy!). My tooth was killing me tonight And I noticed that My regular dose of morphine/oxycodone did nothing to dull it. I headed to the medicine cabinet and took two Tylenol and fifteen minutes later my tooth pain was gone!
I realize that different pain meds work differently, but how can it be that something as strong as morphine doesn’t touch tooth pain. What makes Tylenol so good for my tooth? Very curious!?
Because you’ve build up a tolerance to opiates and dental pain can be particularly nasty (which is why dentists A)get you in so quickly and B)hand out Vicodin and Percocet like candy).
Also, keep in mind that you didn’t just take morphine/oxy, you took one of them (you didn’t specify which one) AND Tylenol. Oxycodone + APAP is Percocet. They put them in one pill for a reason, they work nicely together.
The problem with teeth (and why we are still drilling holes in them to medicate - how crude is that?) is there is only a tiny blood supply actually entering the tooth - your blood could contain 10% by volume of pure opium and it still wouldn’t affect your tooth.
Your lungs and/or heart, OTOH…
Opiates and opioids lower your pain by attaching to receptors in your brain (and few found in other places). The amount of pain they reduce doesn’t have anything to do with the amount of blood going to the site of the injury.
IOW, your answer isn’t correct.
ETA, if 10% of your blood was pure opium, you wouldn’t be feeling your toothache.
As well as being a pain killer, its a weak NSAID , or perhaps strong against some inflammation lesions.
Maybe Acetaminophen turned off the inflammation in the infected tooth ?
Anyway it works differently to the other two pain killers so it was a third shot…
Technically Acetaminophen may also act on TRPV and Cannabinoid receptors,
while your opoids act on Opoid receptors.
Basically there was a 2nd , and third, volume control and you turned them down as well …
(in detail, there are many opoid receptors…as there are many cannabinoid receptors and TRPV receptors… )
What are you talking about? Dentists only drill holes when there’s decay. They can’t leave it in or it spreads within the tooth, so the only way they can effectively get it out is to drill it out. Then they refill the tooth and re-contour it. That’s getting a filling.
Root canals are when there’s some problem with the pulp of the tooth (usu. infection), and they end up drilling out the pulp and filling the whole thing in, and putting a crown on top.
How else would you propose they treat serious cavities and infections?
The tooth is the only body part I know of that is opened just to pack in a medicine - everything else (save really deep holes not found in nature (surgical openings, etc.)) is almost always medicated by using the blood as a delivery mechanism - lung infection? Drill a hole in the lungs, pack in sulfa, and fill the hole with plastic?
The ears and other openings are ready-made for direct delivery, but there aren’t very many of them.
How would I do it? At age 20, replace every tooth with post and crown and be done with the damned things.
Most other parts of the body don’t rot if not taken care of. The parts that do, like skin (think gangrene), are removed. This could be analogous to drilling a tooth. The thing is, since it’s not bone you don’t drill it and/or you’re not awake so it’s not as traumatic since you don’t associate it with the noise and pain of a dentist.
I use aspirin or tylenol for any severe pain and find it much more effective than any narcotic. If I have a longer term chronic pain I would need to go with the narcotic though as I would not want to maintain the dosages I use for a short term type pain.
I have some kind of pinched nerve that maybe acts up once every few years and lasts for about 8 hours at a level where I am almost screaming ibuporopen will give me about 30 min of a tolerable level of pain and then I have to take another. I usually go to er when this happens and they shoot me up with something that makes the pain tolerable but still not to the level of the over the counter drugs.
obbn, are your hydrocodone pills hydrocodone only? Most have acetaminophen in them too. Taking them with extra Tylenol (acetaminophen) might be an overdose.
I hope you don’t really believe that that replacing teeth with implants is a good idea. Good implants are nowhere near as good as good teeth. Besides to get implants one drills into the jawbone didn’t you say drilling into the body is crude?
The portion of the tooth that is filled will not regenerate, when part of the tooth is destroyed by decay or accident no systemic medicine will make it come back.
Instead of pulling the teeth to avoid decay how about good oral care and limiting sugar intake instead? Your idea would cost something like $50,000 and since most teeth don’t decay seems a bit like overkill.
In a pinch and no meds avalible, the use of ice water can help.
I recently had to go in to the ED because of tooth pain and OTC meds were not working. I was worked up for Cardiac and given Nitro. after 4 nitro like .4mg i was ready to go home.
On top of the tooth pain i had Heart burn that wasnt helped with baking soda and the nitro relieved that also. I got a ALS ride 80 miles to a level 2 and was out the next day with a swolen jaw and viens full of anti-biotics.