eli5 How does paracetamol work?
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If we don’t know how does paracetamol work. How do we know it is generally safe? I mean we don’t know what it does and what can it affect? How do we know that long term effects of using it does not harm our body?
Paracetamol is a worthless cheap drug that doesn’t do anything for the pain. It’s more of a placebo drug. It will make you think the pain will go away and yet it doesn’t. It is metabolised by the liver and eliminated within 2- 3 hrs through the urinary tract. It can also damage your liver and can cause stomach upsets.
Aahahahahah – I asked my sister (professor of pharmacy) this and she kind of sucked her teeth and said (as other people here have in the comments) that it’s complicated and no one is entirely sure. She did say that there are possibly two different effects that it has which makes unpicking exactly how it works a bit more complex than normal.
It may get lost, but I would love to share my analogy I often tell patients (Im a nurse) about how different pain killers can work.
Think of pain as a telephone conversation between The Operator, your brain, and a Caller, or the site of the pain. The phone line are the nerves carrying that conversation back and forth. Generally speaking pretty well all analgesics (pain relievers) do their work somewhere along that conversation.
Some pain medications, like NSAIDS (ibuprofen) tend to work on the callers end by lowering the volume of their screams. The Operator is still listening we just arent hurting their ears as bad.
Other ones like Tylenol, tend to work at the operators end, like turning down the volume on their headset.
And still other ones work on the phone line itself (the nerves) to reduce the amount of ‘electrical interference’ that make the operator believe there is a screamer somewhere on the line, this would be neuropathic pain. This can even help me explain “phantom pain”, or pain someone believes is coming from a body part thats been cut off. The Operator is still getting phone calls from the Caller somehow even though the Callers number has been disconnected.
And we are constantly learning more about how things work, or work differently than we thought.
For instance research has suggested that Marijuanas method of action in pain isn’t by changing the volume of the conversation, but by like being a warm hug around the Operator telling it, “Bro, we dont care if anyone out there is yelling or not, everythings going to be just fine if we just get some Doritos.”
Pain is a bugger, and can be really difficult to deal with. But with a little understanding of where in that conversation we need the help can help us decide how to help it.
Answer: it is a swallowable little tablet. You take one, put in mouth, drink little water, and soon pain goes byebye!
COX inhibitor, some of the painkilling action may be due to a minor metabolite AM404 which has some cannabinoid activity.
Mostly? It doesn’t.
https://www.sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2021/04/06/review-raises-questions-about-paracetamol-as-common-pain-reliever.html
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