Dr. Sean Mackey: Tools to Reduce & Manage Pain

If you're not sleeping at night, you're not going to heal and you're not going to be able to do what you need to do the next day; and if taking an NSAID helps you sleep and helps you engage with what you need to do, take it at the lowest dose that you can get away with.

It turns out there are studies that show that swearing works. Swearing reduces pain...

It's not necessarily the distraction is going to completely eliminate one's pain, but it can reduce it significantly ... During the daytime, you can read that book, you can spend time with friends and family, but people with chronic pain that have it 24/7. You can't distract yourself at night when you're trying to get into a relaxed state and fall asleep...

Let's imagine you have a fractured ankle. You don't want to be reaching for a very potent opioid just so that you can continue walking on a fractured ankle that you haven't gotten evaluated by a clinician and perhaps casted. That wouldn't be safe.

Tylenol doesn't have the same side effect or adverse event profile that the NSAIDs do, so Tylenol is safe on an empty stomach. Where you need to be careful about Tylenol is not to exceed exceed 4,000 milligrams or 4 grams per day in divided doses.

Getting into the pain threshold... Do men and women have different pain thresholds? The short answer is yes.

There's not one pain brain area. It is thought to be more of a distributed network of different brain systems.

We've got a lot more data on the benefits of NSAIDs, this class of medication reducing pain, than we have data showing the bad consequences of it.