"Pain?" For headaches I do something different than I do for muscle aches than I do for blunt trauma than I do for lacerations than I do for back pain. There are many different kinds of pain with many different causes and those causes respond differently to different analgesics. Fortunately I have a troublingly-high pain threshold (got a scar from a nail in a sauna without really even noticing; I used to think it was cool until i realized my grandfather died from necrosis associated with peripheral numbness and diabetes) so I use effectively nothing for most things, and aspirin/caffeine for headaches. I'll say this: tylenol is useless for pain and gangbusters for reducing my daughter's fever. Ibuprofen seems to work when there's dire muscle pain. Wondering if the caffeine enhances ibuprofen the same way it enhances aspirin.
I don't get hangovers. Fuck you losers with incentive not to drink! Every OTC painkiller does nothing for me. If I get a headache or something I just wait it out. Do these pills actually do anything for anyone? The idea of Advil doing something is fantasy to me. Every once in a while I'll take an aspirin but even placebo based hope ends up with the same waiting based result.
You know what? I don't mind if it's the placebo effect fixing my headache, or the Excedrin (or whatever). I feel similarly about sleeping pills. I know, especially with sleeping pills, that it's probably much more the fact that I've "primed" my body to expect sleep because I've done something that I know & believe is going to make me sleep, than the pills necessarily actually working. But you know what? At the end of the day I want to fall asleep, so whichever it is that helps me do that, I'm okay with that. It might all be bunk but the bunk seems to be working for me anyway. That being said I generally don't get hangovers. I don't drink to excess a lot, and when I do, I almost always consume B vitamins (and sometimes some food) afterwards. The food prevents a sour stomach and the B vitamins seem to take care of everything else. Last time I was hungover I'd been drinking (and in between tipsy and drunk) for 12 hours. Not to mention walking and sweating in the summer sun for 2 hours. I don't think anything would have stopped that one. I threw up in an empty moving box. I sometimes get migraines. I've had migraines that lasted 3 days, and some that didn't. I'd rather take the medicine and hope it helps than wait for three days. But like, if your pain doesn't last very long in general without medicine, than I can see why you wouldn't bother. It's not like NSAIDs are good for your stomach in any way.
That happened to me once during my undergrad. I had an early class, grabbed an Advil PM because it was dark, and spent the next hour and a half trying to pull a Tom & Jerry taped-open eyelids thing. I apologized profusely to my professor after class, because she was really strict about sleeping in class and it all turned out ok but I don't fuck with that stuff any more.
Possibly. I took (i think) Ambien for my flight to and from Jordan and it worked flawlessly on the trip out and then I woke up about halfway through on the flight back.
Here's a short article (tied to a relatively recent study) that agrees with you http://www.thelifestyleelf.net/new-review-evidence-shows-caffeine-makes-painkillers-more-effective/
I receive, on average, one crippling painful migraine a week, along with a few regular headaches, and I used to receive one literally paralyzing one a month that would render me unable to move any muscle in my body. Ibuprofen is the greatest godsend I've ever had, but it's the most hit or miss thing. Sometimes I'll take 800mg and it will have only enough effect to allow me to continue working in pain, and sometimes 400mg will make it melt completely. Sometimes the addition of caffeine helps, sometimes it makes it worse.
Same here. I've had migraines that medicine barely touched. That's when I realized my headaches were beyond "bad" - when I'd taken 800 mg of whatever and my head was still throbbing so hard with every step that I was trying to walk as softly as possible. Then again I've had headaches medicine has staved off. So for that reason I take it most of the time I feel a headache start, especially if it seems like a bad one, even though it doesn't always work. I try to drink water when I get migraines cuz I figure hydration is a good thing I don't do enough. But I will try caffeine first if I haven't had any.