My dentist gave me Tylox for pain relief after some dental work. It does relieve the pain, but everyone I know says it puts them right to sleep. It doesn’t make me sleepy at all, and when I lie down to try to sleep I have the strangest dreams. What gives?
Meh, drugs have different effects on people. Benadryl has no effect (sedation part of it) on me, yet it makes alot of people I know sleepy. By strange dreams do you mean vivid dreams?
Pot luck. I have at various times taken large doses of Valium (Diazepam) for muscular spasms. Each time I have been warned they will make me sleepy. They don’t - last time I needed to take some I went back to work for the rest of the day. However if I take part of a tablet of its close relative Mogadon (Nitrazepam) it’s good night for me.
Not only do they work differently on different people, they can work differently on the same person at a different time. I’ve had antihistamines sometimes make me sleepy and other times keep me awake. I took Ambien once. Crashed out like a log within 5 minutes. My younger daughter, OTOH, took it and claimed it had absolutely zero effect on her.
I’d be curious myself to know what the mechanism is and what variables cause this to happen.
I’m one of the people that are not affected by Vicodin. Apparently I don’t have the right enzyme to process it, or something like that. I wish it did work on me. Every time I see a doctor for pain, it seems like he’s handing out Vicodin like old time docs used to hand out lollipops. A lollipop will do more for my pain.
I’m lucky in that it does help with the pain - especially since I can’t take non-steriodial antiinflamatories like Naprosen or Alieve. When I finally went to lie down about 4 this morning, I was having very vivid dreams about getting ready for some sort of party with a bunch of people I knew, walking around with a towel on my head.
Maybe my dreams are telling me I need more exitement in my life.
You’re lucky you got to take oxycodone on the first go. I had to go back twice to upgrade to it when I had kidney stones. And yes, drugs affect people differently. Sudafed makes some people jittery and other people mellow. Same for dreams. If I take Guaifenesin before bed I always get weird, looping dreams.
I’ve usually found I was only mildly sedated by narcotics, and then I do have vivid dreams.
Sort of like Valerian root, but with pain relief.
TMI: I respond to Vioxx with nausea/vomiting so strong it eclipses the original illness.
MLS, IAAD, and I don’t know why these variations occur. I have an educated guess. Each person absorbs and processes the drugs based on the cells they’ve got and the enzymes they secrete. Between-person variations in enzymes and in timing of enzyme secretion are well documented (consider the large Asian population with a different liver enzyme for processing alcohol, which causes them to react to a good drunk by going unpleasantly red in the face). If you absorb vicodin, LynnBodoni, unusually slowly, and process it unusually quickly, that could explain why it doesn’t do much for you. Or perhaps you have an unusual cell surface receptor molecule for your endogenous opiates, into which Vicodin fits badly, so you don’t feel its opiate effects.
It would be nearly impossible for the pharmaceutical companies to research this individual-to-individual variation (take a huge number of research subjects and be nearly impossible to establish statistical significance for each), and it wouldn’t help them sell it, anyway. They are interested in average responses and that’s what they publish. The only thing in their drug info that even touches on the variability of subject response to their drugs is the list of possible side effects. “12% experienced nausea, 9% ringing in the ears, 6% unexpected pregnancy, 3% grew wings, and 1% had an uncontrollable urge to write to the Straight Dope.”
I found that hydrocodone and oxycodone never made me sleepy, but other opioids put me right out.