Hi! I know some things about using OTC medication for pain management, because I have chronic migraines and I didn’t have anything else to treat them with for most of a year.
1: ibuprofen, aspirin, and sodium naproxen (NSAID) are good at reducing inflammation but aren’t quite as effective for pain that isn’t inflammation (for migraines specifically, I find ibuprofen and aspirin don’t help much and often give me rebound headaches once they wear off so I don’t use them for migraines. I *have* found sodium naproxen helpful for my migraines tho and I would definitely recommend ibuprofen for pretty much any pain that is caused by an injury)
2: NSAIDs all get filtered out of your bloodstream by your kidneys. Taking too much of one of them, or taking more than one at a time, will put extra stress on your kidneys. If you have kidney problems I suggest you be extra careful with these and talk to a doctor.
3: Tylenol / Acetaminophen isn’t an anti inflammatory medication but it is useful for treating most any kind of pain. It is the go-to OTC for treating migraines and period cramps specifically, they even make specific pills that combine Tylenol with caffeine and other stuff specifically for the purpose of treating those specific things (excedrin for migraine, midol for period cramps).
4: Tylenol gets filtered out of your bloodstream by the liver. Taking too much can stress or damage your liver. If you have liver problems I recommend you be extra careful with Tylenol and talk to a doctor. A quick google says that it’s safe to use Tylenol and alcohol at the same time, assuming you do not do both everyday or in excessive quantities. If you’re an alcoholic, you should avoid using Tylenol very often (like, once or twice a month is probably fine, three times a week is probably not)
5: taking Tylenol with an NSAID is safe and is a very common pain management strategy for post surgery pain (take one, take some of the other before the first one wears off so you aren’t in too much pain before it’s time for another dose of medication 1, keep going like that until you don’t need to anymore)
6: how much is too much? More than the amount recommended for you based on your age and weight in one day, or if you use them more than half the days in a month (aka if you use them 15 or more days per month). If you’re at this point, you should see a doctor about your pain management options (and hopefully deal with whatever is causing you to need pain management so often). I am NOT saying that you should not use those medications if you need pain management that often, just that you should be aware of the risks and hopefully look for other things that can help so you don’t stress your system out too much.
7: it is worth noting that quite a few of the prescription pain medications are actually Tylenol plus something else, because the Tylenol can and often does make the other thing work better than it would alone. It is entirely possible that a doctor might tell you to take Tylenol every day if that is going to be better for you than the pain.
8: Pain is bad for you. Like, even if you have a high pain tolerance and ‘you can take it’ it’s still bad because pain is a physical stress on your whole body and too much stress IS NOT HEALTHY. Your pain doesn’t need to be unbearable to be worth treating, if you have pain, please do something about it. Pain is your body’s signal that something is wrong and you need to do something about it. Sometimes, especially if you have chronic pain, the pain itself is the thing that’s wrong and the inherent stress of pain can harm you all by itself.
9: how can pain itself harm you? I would like to say that I categorically do not know all the ways it can hurt you, but I do know for a fact that pain can and WILL raise your blood pressure (which can be a problem), and chronic pain can and WILL cause depression, anxiety, and PTSD like symptoms at minimum and give you those conditions at a clinically diagnosable severity at worse (not worst, the worst is if your pain drives you to suicide, which it can and does do to people). No I am not joking about chronic pain giving people PTSD, chronic pain is inherently traumatic in my opinion. It’s basically long-term torture that doesn’t (usually) have a human deliberately causing it, but torture nonetheless.
Even if you aren’t sure about the above paragraph, it is still self evidently true that pain occupies brain space and uses mental energy that you would probably prefer to be using on something else.
Treat your pain. Your suffering does not help anyone, especially not yourself.
Since I am not above using a little gentle emotional manipulation (of saying true things to make an emotional appeal to action) to convince people to be kind to themselves: I love you, random person on the internet, and I do not want you to to be in pain, especially if you can avoid it. I am sad, right now, thinking about all the people who feel like they should tough out their pain for whatever reason, and I am not the only one. Please don’t be one the people making me sad.
So take your fucking medicine.