Astral Codex Ten

ibuprofen

4 min read

ibuprofen

Article

ibuprofen is a recurring brand in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 4 times across 4 issues between April 13, 2022 and August 13, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “mothers who took the alternate headache medication ibuprofen did not have kids with more ADHD”; “Ibuprofen (“Advil”, “Motrin”) has effect sizes”; “Ibuprofen helps arthritis pain”. It most often appears alongside Leucht et al, acetaminophen, ACX survey.

Metadata

  • Category: Brands
  • Mention count: 4
  • Issue count: 4
  • First seen: April 13, 2022
  • Last seen: August 13, 2024

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Obscure Pregnancy Interventions: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
April 13, 2022 · Original source
Doctors have been gradually chipping away at pregnant women’s ability to use pain medication. First it was “don’t use opioids, your baby could have birth defects”. Then it was “and don’t use ibuprofen, your baby could have kidney problems”. Then it was “and don’t use too much aspirin either, your baby could get cardiovascular problems”. That left Tylenol (aka Panadol, paracetamol, acetaminophen, etc) as the only pregnancy-safe pain reliever. Well, bad news…
ADHD is very genetic, so we should be alert for possible confounders like “ADHD moms get more stressed, have more headaches, and so use more Tylenol, and then their kids inherit their ADHD”. But we have two signs that this isn’t what’s going on here. First, a (relatively weak) finding that mothers who took the alternate headache medication ibuprofen did not have kids with more ADHD. And second, two studies (1, 2) finding that taking Tylenol immediately after or immediately before pregnancy has no effect - if it was just a proxy for class or ADHD you’d expect the same correlation regardless of the woman’s pregnancy status. All of this makes the effect look real.
Inline links: finding, 1, 2
But remember: all the other painkillers, eg ibuprofen, are even worse. So what if you have pain during pregnancy?
All Medications Are Insignificant In The Eyes Of God And Traditional Effect Size Criteria
May 31, 2023 · Original source
This doesn’t even include some of my favorites. Zolpidem (“Ambien”) has effect size around 0.39 for getting you to sleep faster. Ibuprofen (“Advil”, “Motrin”) has effect sizes between from about 0.20 (for surgical pain) to 0.42 (for arthritis). All of these are around the 0.30 effect size of antidepressants. There’s no anti-ibuprofen lobby trying to rile people up about NSAIDs, so nobody’s pointed out that this is “clinically insignificant”. But by traditional standards, it is!
Inline links: 0.39, 0.20, 0.42
Attempts To Put Statistics In Context, Put Into Context
June 08, 2023 · Original source
Ibuprofen helps arthritis pain: 0.42
Inline links: 0.42
Why Does Ozempic Cure All Diseases?
August 13, 2024 · Original source
Most of the relevant papers say the drugs work by preventing inflammation. This is a catch-all term for the immune response to microbes; although it helps fight the microbes, it’s slightly toxic to the rest of the body and generally bad unless you’re actively fighting an infection. In chronic inflammation, ie the thing most of us with modern diets have all the time, general bad health damages the body, the immune system mistakes the damage for a microbial infection, and it provokes a constant low-grade inflammatory response. This is bad, so (if you’re not fighting an infection) anti-inflammatories are generally pretty useful. There are lots of anti-inflammatory drugs (aspirin is one, ibuprofen is another), but inflammation is a multifaceted process and no one drug can stop it entirely.