Thanks! I definitely appreciate your insight on this.
Anecdotally, it doesn’t work well for me.
Anecdotally, acetaminophen doesn’t have any effect at all for me. (It made my mother feel ill.)
Ibuprofen works best for me for headaches; aspirin for muscle aches.
Probably not relevant to most folks here, but NSAIDS can cause grief for people with congestive heart failure and those with even mild kidney disease (especially in diabetics and especially if they’re also using ACEIs or ARBs, which many are).
I don’t think their occasional use is anything to worry about, but daily or near-daily use by people with those problems/meds can be risky.
On the other hand, even chronic use of acetaminophen is generally well tolerated.
This thread sounds like the reverse of the conventional laymen’s wisdom from maybe 20 years ago, which was:
a) acetaminophen damages the liver, and
b) go nuts with ibuprofen – no side affects at any dose!
So … in 2020 … 3000 mg/day of acetaminophen is safe for healthy patients … but a similar daily dosing of ibuprofen is probably contraindicated?
Does an individual’s bodyweight have any bearing with the dosages here?
This all reads true to me. Tylenol has never worked for me…for anything. For muscle aches I use ibuprofen. I get bad migraines. Absolutely nothing OTC works for them (I use a triptan – specifically, a generic Imitrex).
Gonna concur on this.
10 years back, I was scheduled for gallbladder surgery. I was also dealing with some fairly significant shoulder / knee pain issues that had me on NSAIDs pretty much daily. I had to stop them 10 days before, and just use Tylenol.
Those 10 days really, really sucked.
Honestly, for the OP: as long as you don’t have any stomach issues etc., I’d stick with whichever one works best. The amount you’re taking is unlikely to be a problem no matter what you use. I tended to think of them all as interchangeable, though for that knee / shoulder pain, the doctor prescribed diclofenac (a COX-2 inhbitor - somewhat similar to OTC NSAIDS) and wow, that stuff worked so very, very much better than ibuprofen. It’s harsher on the stomach, so it was actually combined with a stomach-protecting medication.
I take ibuprofen for headaches, general aches, and fortunately it works on my occasional migraines. I always thought of acetaminophen as being pretty useless.
But I recently had 2 surgeries and a nasty infection as a result, and I was surprised that the docs gave me acetaminophen. (Well, some narcotics too, but only for a day or two as the pain wasn’t really that bad). The acetaminophen was extremely effective in easing the pain. When I tried ibuprofen for it, it did nothing.