A study based on a review of V.A. patient records that was published last month in a medical journal, Gastroenterology, found that the rate of stomach bleeding caused by etodolac was substantially lower than that caused by naproxen and comparable to that of Vioxx.
You may want to ask your doc about etodolac, aka Lodine.
FReepmail me if you want on or off my health and science ping list.
Bumping...
The technical, hence expensive, book on the subject is Travell and Simons's Myofascial Pain and Dysfunction: The Trigger Point Manual. FWIW, Janet Travell was John F. Kennedy's doctor.
The practical manual (under $14 at Amazon) is Claire Davies's The Trigger Point Therapy Workbook: Your Self-Treatment Guide for Pain Relief.
You can do more good with this book and a firm tennis ball than a physician, a surgeon, and a chiropractor could do with your whole bank account. And you'll avoid the potentially fatal side-effects of pain-killing drugs.
Frequent visits to the chiropractor and an occassional 15 mg MS Contin has been doing just fine for 10 years now.
IOW, the lame-ass doctors are gonna start prescribing the pills only in a manner consistent with their intended purpose. We need serious prescription reform:
Ban all the prescription-medicine television advertising. Doctors should prescribe a drug because it is their medical opinion that their patients need the drug, not because the patient saw an advertisement.
Ban instant prescriptions, such as over the internet or over the telephone, from doctors who have not previously met the patient in person.
Prohibit border crossing to obtain legal drugs.
Make the doctor, not the drug company, solely responsible for damages caused by the prescription of a drug in a manner inconsistent with the drug's labelling. (As in Phen-Fen, celebrex, Viagara, RU-486, estrogen, and other abuses.)
No, these aren't very libertarian. But it's nonsensical to have requirements for prescriptions and testing of drugs, and then these absurd Clinton-era medical practices going on.
That table is insufficient. Some of those drugs are very effective for some types of pain and not others. For instance, aspirin and tylenol were useless with a toothache which needed a root canal, but advil did work. Likewise, Advil was useless for fever-induced headaches, but Aspirin worked. And Tylenol works better for migraines than aspirin or advil.
A number of other parents I have met swore by the efficacy of herbal "teething tablets". I bought some of these, then noticed that they were a homeopathic remedy. I do not see how homeopathic medicines can possibly work so I think all the people who noticed an effect of the tablets must be fooling themselves. The Amazing Randi has a $1 million dollar offer to anyone who can prove the efficacy of a homeopathic remedy. The money is unclaimed.