Show 1005: Balancing Benefit & Risk for Pain Relief
The People's Pharmacy
Joe and Terry Graedon
4.6 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 10 September 2015
⏱️ 58 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Millions of Americans rely on popular pain relievers such as celecoxib, diclofenac, ibuprofen, meloxicam, naproxen and other NSAIDs (nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs). The fact that some of these medications are available without prescription in products such as Advil, Aleve or Motrin IB gives many of us the impression that they must be safe.
Balancing Benefit & Risk of Pain Relievers:
This summer the FDA beefed up its warning that NSAID use can increase the chance of suffering a heart attack or a stroke. The risk begins to increase within the first few weeks of use and continues to rise the longer someone takes such a drug. Higher doses also appear to be riskier.
These medicines are a mainstay of treatment for such painful conditions as arthritis, bursitis, gout, plantar fasciitis and tendinitis, not to mention back pain. What alternatives do people have to alleviate their pain?
SPRINT Study Stopped Early:
You may have heard the announcement that a large study designed to find out about the benefits of lowering blood pressure in middle-aged and older people was stopped two years before schedule. The scientists running the study found that getting systolic blood pressure below 120 offered so much benefit that it would be unethical to keep the study going. How much do we know about this study? Did the researchers take into account the side effects of multiple blood pressure medication?
We discuss the problems of balancing benefit & risk of medications for pain, the treatment of high blood pressure and the reason you shouldn’t feel bad about leaving your bed unmade. We answer your questions with pharmacologist and health journalist David Kroll.
This Week’s Guest:
David Kroll, PhD, is a pharmacologist and medical writer in the Research Triangle Park area of North Carolina. He has taught at the University of Colorado, Duke University and North Carolina Central University. He now works on educating the public on matters pharmacological through his blogs. The picture is of Dr. Kroll.
Listen to the Podcast:
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, I'm Joe Graydon. |
| 0:02.3 | I'm Terry Graydon. |
| 0:03.8 | Welcome to this podcast of the People's Pharmacy, where we bring you the stories behind the health headlines. |
| 0:10.2 | This podcast is brought to you by Redix Industries, makers of utterly smooth body cream. |
| 0:16.0 | 800-345-7339 on the web at utter cream.com. |
| 0:29.6 | Every day, tens of millions of Americans swallow a pain reliever. |
| 0:35.6 | Drugs like Advil and Aleve are really popular. |
| 0:38.3 | How safe are such insides? |
| 0:40.8 | This is the People's Pharmacy with Terry and Joe Graydon. |
| 0:48.1 | The FDA recently strengthened its warning on non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs such as dichlofenac, ibuprofen, molyxicam, and neproxen. |
| 1:00.0 | The cardiovascular complications of n-seds are more serious than most people realize, do you need to be concerned? |
| 1:07.1 | Those with arthritis or other types of chronic pain face a difficult dilemma. |
| 1:11.7 | Without pain relief, they often have a hard time functioning. |
| 1:15.1 | What else can they do besides taking n-seds? |
| 1:18.3 | Coming up on the people's pharmacy, pain reliever pros and cons and non-drug approaches. |
| 1:25.1 | First, this news. |
| 1:30.4 | In the People's Pharmacy Health Headlines, |
| 1:34.0 | a new analysis of blood sugar shows that diabetes is becoming more common among Americans. |
| 1:38.9 | The study published in JAMA this week reveals that as many as 14% of adults have diabetes. |
| 1:46.3 | The criteria are a fasting blood sugar of 126 or higher or a hemoglobin A1C of 6.5% or greater. |
| 1:55.1 | The HBA1C test is a way of measuring average blood sugar over about three months. |
| 2:01.4 | More than a third of the people with diabetes had gone undiagnosed. |
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