Can You Take Painkillers With Antibiotics? Proper Use Of Medicine

Wonders of science had come a long way from an ancient time when we used herbs as medication, and now we have compact, well-crafted medicine to help patients get better. There are many different options, and they treat different conditions as prescribed by a doctor.

One of the most common types of medication is painkillers which help relieve patients from pain when they are ill. 

You could be sick, and a doctor prescribes antibiotics to fight the infection, but you are still in pain, can you use antibiotics? Let’s get into the details; 

Can You Take Painkillers with Antibiotics?

You can take painkillers with antibiotics if you have a headache or pain in your body. It is common for doctors or pharmacists to prescribe antibiotics with an option of a painkiller like ibuprofen to ease the patient’s pain. Always talk to your doctor before taking any medication to ensure it is safe for you. 

Can You Take Pain Relievers After COVID 19 Vaccines?

In February of 2020, Coronavirus made it into the US, and the first fatalities succumbed to the infection. In the months that followed, thousands of people lost their lives in the US and worldwide as the disease spread even further.

Luckily, scientists put in hours of study and came up with several vaccines to help manage the rate of infections. 

The vaccine came as a result of millions of dollars of research, and it was a significant change of pace but wasn’t without setbacks. 

The vaccines have some severe short-term side effects on the people that use them. You can get headaches, diarrhea, chills, muscle pain, fever, and pain at the injection site. These will make you uncomfortable, and you will want to take painkillers, but can you? 

The vaccine is a precious resource, and you don’t want to do anything that might dampen your response to the vaccine. 

Most doctors have a theoretical concern that taking painkillers or something that can reduce your fever could blunt your immune response to the vaccine.

Some people need painkillers and take them daily for other medical reasons. Such people don’t need to change since their bodies are adept at dealing with pain relievers’ constant presence. 

For people that don’t use painkillers regularly, there is no reason to start using them before the vaccination. After the vaccine, if you feel a lot of pain in your hand, you can try a warm or cold compress to ease the muscles and reduce the pain.

You can also do some exercises with your arm to get it back to its normal state or apply a topical medication on the site and ease the pain without messing with the vaccine. If the pain becomes unbearable, you can use a painkiller to calm it down.

The important thing is to try as hard as possible not to use any painkillers unless you have to. If you are going for the second shot and you know how badly the first one affected you, you can use pain killers to avoid the pain or prepare mentally for it. 

If you start developing symptoms of an immune response afterward, then it is reasonable to take the medication since your body is fighting the infection.

How Does Your Body Process Medicine? 

Let us use a scenario where you take ibuprofen for a sore ankle. The tablet will get to your stomach within minutes, and the stomach’s acid fluids will disintegrate it. You can also improve your gastrointestinal health with probiotics for your gut for problems such as SIBO, IBS, and much more.

But how does the medicine get to where it should be in the first place? Let us follow the process to see how a pill you take goes through your body;

The medicine hitches a ride in your circulatory system to move through your body to do its work before the antibodies neutralize and expel it from the body. This process starts in your digestive system since you swallow the pill.

Let us use a scenario where you take ibuprofen for a sore ankle. The tablet will get to your stomach within minutes, and the stomach’s acid fluids will disintegrate it. 

The ibuprofen will then travel to your small intestine, where the body will absorb it into your blood vessels.

The blood vessels will move the ibuprofen to the vein, which carries blood and its content to the liver. Enzymes in the liver will react with the ibuprofen particles as the blood goes through the liver.

The enzymes will damage some ibuprofen molecules, and they will no longer work as painkillers, but most of the ibuprofen will make it past the liver. It will then continue its journey through the veins into your body’s blood circulation system.

About 30 minutes after taking the pill, some doses would have made it into the circulatory bloodstream.

This loop will go through every limb, organ, muscle, and tissue, including the heart, brain, kidneys, and back through the liver.

The drug molecules will bind to specific target molecules that cause the pain response when they get to a location where the body’s pain response is active. 

They will block the production of compounds that induce pain; as more drug molecules accumulate, the pain reduces.

The effect will reach its maximum in about an hour or two, and the body will start to eliminate the drug molecules from your body. The ibuprofen molecules in the blood dose will decrease by half every two hours on average. 

The blood will circulate and go back to the liver, where the enzymes will transform another small amount of ibuprofen into metabolites that the kidney will filter out in the urine. This happens about one time each minute, and the drug level will keep dropping.

This basic process works for all drugs you ingest; the speed of the process and the amount of drugs that remain in the liver varies depending on how it gets into the body, the person’s physiology, and the type of drug.

This is where prescriptions and dosages come in; you have to get them right. If the dosage is too low, there won’t be enough to make a difference in your body. If it is too low, the liver won’t process it, leading to an overdose.

Dosage is average, and it could be hard to prescribe medication to a child since their vitals fluctuate and how they process medicine in their bodies changes quickly. Genetics, disease, diet, and pregnancy can influence how your body handles medicine.

The Dangers Of Mixing Drugs

Drugs are incredible, and they help us fight off infections that would give us a lot of trouble in a different scenario. Sometimes, we inadvertently create drug interactions in our bodies, and these interactions could lead to kidney failure, internal bleeding, or kidney failure. 

Drug interactions occur in the body when a drug and another substance make contact in the body and cause different effects that each would have independently. Fruits, food, illegal substances, and legal drugs can all bring about drug interactions.

These typically fall into two groups; the first is when two drugs’ effects affect one another directly. In other situations, one drug affects how your body works with the other drug, how the body absorbs, metabolizes, and transports it. 

For instance, blood thinner or anticoagulants and aspirin have the same effect on the body, but they work differently, and their effects could be dangerous if you use them together. 

They both prevent blood clots, anticoagulants prevent the production of clotting elements that bind clots, and aspirin prevents blood cells from forming into clumps that cause clots. These outcomes are safe and suitable for your body individually.

Taken together, these two can prevent blood clotting to a life-threatening extent, possibly causing internal bleeding. 

Some drugs elicit the opposite response, and you might think they cancel each other out, but this isn’t the case.

Let’s say you take cocaine and heroin at the same time. Cocaine, for instance, is a stimulant that will increase the heart rate and make the body require more supply of oxygen. 

Heroin is a depressant, and it will slow breathing down and reduce the body’s oxygen supply.

This means that your breathing rate will reduce just when your heart needs more oxygen to keep up the pumping. This will strain the organs and cause death due to respiratory failure.

Sometimes one drug or food prevents enzymes from acting on another since it takes the active sites on the enzymes. 

This means you will have a high concentration of one or both drugs in your bloodstream longer than you need to; thus, it can be harmful.

Conclusion

You can take painkillers with antibiotics, but you need to talk to your doctor and get a go-ahead from them before doing it. Some medications are good for you independently, but they become dangerous when you take them simultaneously.

When taking medication, always use water since any other substance could have an unforeseen effect on how your body deals with the medication. It is always better to be safe than sorry, and a small mistake could cost you’re your life, so be careful with medication.