Opioids put me to sleep in 15 minutes flat, dead to the world for 6-8 hrs. Help with the pain? Dunno, wasn't conscious.

They have no effect on my brother until they get to an insane dosage where they start suppressing respiration. (He was a paid guinea pig a lot in grad school...so when it happened in a study, he got all sorts of tests done that pointed to a weird genetic abnormality.) We think my mom likely has same, which is why she hated them-they did nothing for her post surgical pain. What made her miserable was the pain, drugs were irrelevant.

**(No, seriously, Tylenol might as well be M&Ms for all the good they do me. They do help with Tim's arthritis pain, though, so YTylenolMV.)

I feel the same way about advil. Anything less than 800mg is candy. Give me Tylenol

When I had my tooth abscess/root canal, the dentist gave me a schedule of 2 advil, then two hours later, 2 tylenol, and on and on. That worked really well. I believe it was to avoid opiates, as my previous root canal 10 or so years ago landed me with percocet.

My mother is classic her: she just came home from a meeting, came into my apartment to say, "should we put the yard waste barrel out?" I was like, I dunno, does it have stuff in it? Yes, it does. I'm in my pajamas! Why couldn't she just put it out on her way in when she noticed it wasn't?!? I said I'd do it in the morning.

If you have kidney issues, ibuprofen is bad. (This is probably a gross generalization.)

Apparently NSAIDs (including ibuprofen) are a no for bone healing. None allowed for me.

WTAF? Bad for you specifically, or bad as a blanket policy? Because obviously it's just fine for a lot of people. And if I recall that one This American Life (?) correctly, you're way less likely to overdose on Advil than Tylenol.

I was told by my doctor when I was diagnosed with arthritis in my knee that Ibuprofen was far more toxic to the kidneys than Tylenol was on the liver, and that if I was going to take one for daily pain management, it should be tylenol.

So interesting! I've just been taking ibuprofen willy-nilly.

I loathed that fuzzy, floaty feeling that I had on opioids for three days after my wisdom tooth extraction, and found that Advil was actually more effective in treating my pain at the level it had dropped to by day 4. Of course, if I'd been dealing with something as bad as a broken leg I might have been a lot more okay with floating off into the metaphorical opium den.

Is aspirin a good option for those of us whose stomachs don't mind?