Had upper molar pulled this morning

[ShazzieB]

3. I am delighted to hear that tooth is finally out!

Sorry to hear the extraction is giving you so much pain. Doctors used to prescribe opioids for this kind of postoperative pain, but these days most of them avoid those as much as possible, for fear of their addictiveness. Unfortunately, that sometimes leaves patients with less than optimal pain relief.

The oral surgeon who removed my daughter's wisdom teeth had a helpful trick. His aftercare instructions for pain were to give her both extra strength Tylenol and ibuprofen, alternating every 2 hours. For example:

1. Take a dose of one drug, we'll say Tylenol (it doesn't matter which one you start with). Note the time.

2. Two hours later, take a dose of ibuprofen.

3. Two hours after that, take the Tylenol again.

Keep alternating every two hours. This will give you better pain relief than either drug alone, with no gaps in effectiveness. When you just take one drug, it can start wearing off before it's time for the next dose. With two drugs overlapping, that will not happen.

This is perfectly safe, because these medications are in 2 completely different classes of drugs.

Ibuprofen is an NSAID (stands for non steroidal anti inflammatory drug). Other NSAIDs include aspirin, naproxen, and a whole list of others. Taking 2 NSAIDS at the same time is NOT recommended, due to the risk of side effects. Tylenol is not an NSAID, however, so it can safely be combined with an NSAID in the manner described above.

As I said, this regimen was prescribed for my daughter by her oral surgeon after she had her wisdom teeth removedl (I would never have considered doing this myself, much less recommending it to anyone else otherwise), and it worked great! I think we only had to do it for a couple of days, as she recovered pretty fast.

I wish you a smooth and speedy recovery, and I hope the antobiotics knock out that infection quickly. I have a feeling your overall well-being is going to greatly improve once you heal from the extraction and the infection. In the meantime...