Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with painkillers

Why don't painkillers or caffeine affect me?

timory — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 09:10:53 -0800

No matter how much ibuprofen, acetaminophen or naproxen I have, it does absolutely nothing for me. No matter how much coffee I drink, I'm just as sleepy as ever. What gives? This isn't just drugs in general. Melatonin puts me to sleep. Alcohol gets me drunk. Cigarettes make me jittery sometimes (although I've never, ever been addicted no matter how hard I "tried"... even a pack a day in college for a few months had no effect on me when I abruptly stopped).

I should point out a few things:

1) I do drink coffee a lot, but it's the same as with cigarettes. I can stop drinking it for weeks or months at a time, and I never feel any kind of withdrawal. When I start up again, it doesn't give me the intended effect at all.

2) Don't worry, I'm not popping entire bottles of Tylenol. I rarely take painkillers at all because they don't have an effect on me, so I don't think I have built up a resistance. Occasionally, when I get a truly horrible, brainsplitting headache, I try to take a painkiller in the hopes that something will happen. At that point, even when I take several times the recommended dosage, nothing happens to me at all.

3) I saw this post, but I don't think it answers my question.

Pre-extraction wisdom teeth pain management

prozach1576 — Wed, 06 May 2009 07:34:41 -0800

I'm getting all four wisdom teeth out on May 29th. For the last month or so I have felt intense pressure in my mouth from the teeth coming in. It's been getting a little worse each week and is now causing headaches. It's only May 6th. How should I manage the pain? I have been able to deal with it fairly well with a rotation of OTC painkillers, but I have some concerns about how safe this is. I have generally been popping 1000mg of acetaminophen when I get to work around 9:00am. This has been getting me through the morning and early afternoon. I then take 800mg of ibuprofen when the pain starts to come back. I'll usually take 600-800mg more sometime in the evening if necessary. I don't think this is too extreme, but I've been doing it for a couple weeks now and there are a few weeks to go, and that makes me uncomfortable. Is this safe? Acetaminophen in particular scares me because of how hard it is on my liver, although I've found it much more effective than ibuprofen. Additionally, it's getting to the point where it's not getting the job done anymore. I've still been hurting like hell the last two days.

Moving up the surgery is not an option due to scheduling conflicts.

Can I call the surgeon and ask for a prescription for stronger painkillers? I've never taken prescription painkillers before, really I've never been prescribed anything in my life except for some antibiotics for childhood strep throat infections. So, I'm unfamiliar with the etiquette here. Is this likely to work? Can I take stronger painkillers on a somewhat regular basis for that long? I'm just kind of clueless as to what to do since I've never been confronted with chronic pain before or dealt with a health care provider in this way.

"Quarelin" painkiller in the USA?

redteam — Wed, 16 May 2007 07:21:21 -0800

Is there something like the Hungarian "Quarelin" painkiller available in the USA? Quarelin is this incredibly effective headache-killer that my Hungarian girlfriend introduced me to. It wipes out headaches really quickly and very reliably. Usually, my girlfriend has Hungarian visitors bring her a bunch of boxes of the stuff but no one has visited in almost a year. We use them very sparingly for bad headaches and we're almost out.

Does anyone know if something like Quarelin is available (for cheap) in the USA? Maybe through a prescription?

I can't really find any names or any info on my own. According to a Romanian and a Hungarian source, the tablets are composed of:

[Romanian]
400 mg metamizol sodic, 60 mg cafeina, 40 mg drotaverina hidroclorica

[Hungarian]
400 mg metamizol-nátrium, 60,0 mg koffein, 40,0 mg drotaverin-hidroklorid

How do people order Vicodin online without getting arrested?

thebrokenmuse — Wed, 09 May 2007 15:58:42 -0800

I just watched an episode of Intervention where the woman was addicted to Vicodin. How does one go about ordering vicodin off of the internet without being arrested? This woman ordered lots and lots of Vicodin off of the internet. How did she do this without getting in trouble? It seems to me that she should have gotten caught somehow. Am I wrong?

Also, this woman seemed to be in fine health, with the exception of desperatly needing Vicodin. Does anyone know someone who was addicted to Vicodin? What does it/can it do to you?

I was just sort of taken offgaurd at how easily this woman was able to order this drug online with seemingly no legal consequences.

Headache + Flu + Fever + Expired Tylenol =?

Ironmouth — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 11:10:17 -0800

I'm at home, sick with the flu. I have a headache, sore throat and a low grade fever. I've gone through all of my current tylenol. I still have a bottle with an expiration date of June '05. Its freezing and I don't want to go outside for some more. Can I take the old stuff? Will it work?

My neighbors are kinda creeping me out.

bookish — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 04:13:51 -0800

Why are the scetchy dudes who live downstairs throwing away hundreds of empty boxes of painkillers? I'm currently living in Jaipur, India, in the home of a woman who rents out her downstairs to "paying guests". The part of the house we live in is not at all connected to the downstairs-- we enter by going up a detached stairway.

Two new guys moved in a couple of weeks ago; I don't know anything about them, except that they aren't students like the previous renters were. They unloaded several huge desks; when I asked Bhabhiji, the landlady, if they were running some kind of business, she said no. One afternoon the two men came into our part of the house and spent a good fifteen minutes yelling back and forth with Bhabhiji; I don't speak enough Hindi to have any idea what it was about, and no explanation was offered.

The other day I noticed a huge open trashbag on the front patio. It stood out because there is no trash pickup around here, and most places don't even have trash cans (who needs garbage disposal when you have the street?). It was completely full of small, torn open cardboard boxes that say ROSPIN-DS on them, and in smaller print, "Diclofenac Potassium, Paracetamol & Serratiopeptidase Tablets."

I gather that this is some kind of OTC painkiller, but I can't fathom why they're using so much of it. Would they be repackaging it for some reason? Or using it to synthesize something else? I'm dying of curiosity.