: Why should you alternate acetaminophen and ibuprofen ?
In: Biology
It’s not necessarily that you SHOULD, it’s that you CAN do so safely. If your pain is well-managed with just one of them, then there’s no reason to take the other. It’s easy to cause harm by taking too much of either one, but their mechanisms are different. You get more continuous pain relief without the adverse effects.
Because you can then be taking *A* painkiller more frequently than it would be safe to if you were sticking to one or the other. Since they work in different ways, they complement each other.
Also note, there are maximums that are safe in a given time period, so you shouldn’t take Advil and multi-symptom cold medicine, and other things all at the same time – you can go over because they might have doses of the same medicine.
But Tylenol and Advil are processed differently by the body so having one doesn’t affect the processing of the other.
These medications are tough on our bodies to process. One gets processed through the kidneys and the other through the liver. If you happen to need a lot of it for a short time, or normal amount for a longer time, it spreads the workload between 2 organs.
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