Ibuprofen – why is it recommended to take 2 x tablets every 4 hours but not allowed 1 x tablet every 2 hours. Surely it would make the pain relief longer lasting?

Question

Ibuprofen – why is it recommended to take 2 x tablets every 4 hours but not allowed 1 x tablet every 2 hours. Surely it would make the pain relief longer lasting?

In: Biology

Answer 1

2 words: Blood Level. The idea is to get enough of the medicine into your blood at one time to have an effect. Most drugs have a linear relationship of medication dose and medication effect but they also tend to need to get over a certain threshold before they have any noticeable effect. So 2 ibuprofen gets 400mg into you at once which then gets eliminated over a predictable amount of time until your blood level drops to the point that the manufacturer recommends another dose to get your blood level back up to an effective level.

Once you have it up to an effective level, yes, you could take one every 2-3 hours and probably achieve the same thing, but that is making the directions unnecessarily complicated.