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New insights into why aspirin works so well

eurekalert.org

231–240 of 291 posts

Re: New insights into why aspirin works so well

#231
"It’s important that we understand how it works so we can develop safer drugs with fewer side effects."

Allow me to translate: it's important to understand how it works so we can develop a patented drug that costs 100x more per dose, then we will work on getting aspirin banned due to its "side effects"

Re: New insights into why aspirin works so well

#232

Aspirin has been a life changer for long Covid. The other painkillers make symptoms 10x worse. Many people wonder if aspirin anti platelet/blood thinning capabilities is helping breakup microclots which brings relief. There’s also a thing called nattokinase that apparently has similar properties to aspirin and is being studied for heart disease. It has been shown to break down blood clots and even degrade the spike p…

Aspirin+Claritin was what I used when I had a few weeks of extended COVID effects past the actual infection. It really does seem to work! Or at least I think I had it... I never actually tested, I just assumed I should probably isolate regardless of whether it was COVID or the flu.

Tests are plentiful and easy. If you think you have it, get a test and find out. You still did the right thing by isolating, but advocating for aspirin and Claritin as relief for covid while not actually knowing for sure you had it is not as good. In fact, it can be dangerous, given those two drugs may interact with things others take but then read this and assume it's an effective treatment. You could have just been having an allergic reaction to early spring.

Re: New insights into why aspirin works so well

#233

"it can cause detrimental side effects such as internal bleeding and organ damage" NSAIDs are also ototoxic, meaning that they cause hearing damage.

Yeah, for all the hype about opioids being bad, these 'safe' drugs are way more dangerous than commonly purported. Acetaminophen is especially bad because the toxicity threshold is only slightly above the therapeutic dose. That is why they have to put so many warnings on this 'safe' drug. Yet let's blame opioids. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therapeutic_index

Acetaminophen has become a target lately, but the numbers don't really support that level of worry. Relatively few people are injured by acetaminophen overdose, and a large fraction of those are intentional suicide attempts. It's not even close to being the most dangerous OTC drug, ibuprofen kills way more people.

Re: New insights into why aspirin works so well

#234

I use nothing for reducing inflammation, nor any drugs since decades, when I'm ill from time to time (once or twice a year), I let the fever go, the body is just working actively, it's not especially uncomfortable

I'm sure you didn't mean it this way, but this does read as if you're shaming people for using painkillers. No-one should have to endure pain and there's nothing wrong with the responsible use of drugs to reduce it.

Avoiding pain is an anti-goal. There is starting to be good evidence that aggressive pain management with a goal of having patients feel no pain is linked heavily to opiod overprescriptions (which become fent users).

That doesn't mean the answer is no pain medicine. You should try to keep pain in a bearable, functioning range.

Re: New insights into why aspirin works so well

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Science has all along been testing if something works and then finding out why. Often the „why“ is orders of magnitudes harder to find out than the „if“. For example, we can observe how the brain functions in some instances, but why it works like does will elude us perhaps forever. Highly complex systems like the inner biomechanical workings of our brains are essentially a black box.

"Why" questions in general are pretty difficult question to answer in a satisfactory way. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36GT2zI8lVA

Feynman doesn't disappoint. Although, I would have liked for him to make clear how quickly we (including physicists like him) get to "we have no idea". Sort of the overall arc of his answer made it seem that, well we know why but it would be impossible to explain it to you because it is incomparable to anything else you might know. But the reality is, we quickly arrive at the four fundamental forces (the we know of) for which we have no explanation, no further reducibility (that we know of). We know they exist because we can observe them or work them out mathematically. But we have to just accept them on their face as they are in order for the rest of the universe to make sense.

Re: New insights into why aspirin works so well

#236
Today an allergist told me the random lip swelling I experience (angioterma) has been caused in many other patients by NSAIDs like Aspirin, Tylenol (acetaminophen), and a Alleve (naproxen sodium). I hate to think that's true, but apparently it is a studied phenomena: https://aacijournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1710-...

Re: New insights into why aspirin works so well

#237

Today an allergist told me the random lip swelling I experience (angioterma) has been caused in many other patients by NSAIDs like Aspirin, Tylenol (acetaminophen), and a Alleve (naproxen sodium). I hate to think that's true, but apparently it is a studied phenomena: https://aacijournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1710-...

> Tylenol (acetaminophen)

Is not an NSAID. One of its primary uses is as a medication for people who can’t use NSAIDs.

Re: New insights into why aspirin works so well

#238
post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Why" questions in general are pretty difficult question to answer in a satisfactory way. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36GT2zI8lVA

I think “how” is more appropriate in the GP’s comment.

We can understand a thousand instances "how", but it will always be "why" that ties them together.

Like software incompatibility: every program is the story of "how", written explicitly, and translated into instructions. The only way to fit them together is to implement "why". If we could write both stories together, we could factor out incompatibility.

Re: New insights into why aspirin works so well

#239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's something like a downward spiral into hell that is opiates which starts with low doses like what you're on and escalates into worse and worse bullshit because you're not even trying to treat the underlying inflammation before masking the pain with opiates, and then the movement the pain is trying to prevent you from doing happens anyways and you just end up with more damage. I'm telling you these alternatives…

"just try weed bro" is the absolute worst most condescending advice you can give to someone suffering from chronic pain who didn't ask for advice. Do you really, really think someone just "went to opiates" before trying absolutely everything to identify and treat the underlying cause?

Depends on the medical system in whoever's country

It's really different depending on where you are

Also I think "weed" and "large doses of CBD" are really different things

Re: New insights into why aspirin works so well

#240
post #230
post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any good literature on Aspirin and LC? Not a doubter, actually I have LC myself.

The micro-clots in covid and long-covid are fibrin clots, not platelet clots. There is endless documentation and photos of this, it looks like tangled spaghetti. Every report of aspirin vs covid is wishful thinking, it does nothing. The amount of misinformation with covid and long-covid is astounding.

This article talks about how aspirin works and what was learned. Inhibiting the COX enzyme and reducing the activation of platelets can indirectly help prevent the formation of fibrin clots.
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