Ibuprofen

It is common for your muscles to hurt for 24 to 48 hours after you exercise. A recent study from the University of Texas at Galveston showed that you can decrease the soreness by taking the aspirin-like compound ibuprofen before you exercise, but doing so can interfere with your training.Your muscles are supposed to hurt for a day or two after you exercise vigorously, but not after you exercise at a leisurely pace. Many people learn this early in their training, but if they don't exercise intensely in training, they do not improve.

Q.When I went through menopause six years ago, my doctor prescribed Premarin and Provera for hot flashes. Three years ago, he switched me to Prempro. I wondered whether I needed to continue on hormone replacement therapy, but he was very insistent that hormones would be beneficial for my bones and my heart. Three months ago, a routine mammogram showed that I had early stages of breast cancer. Since then, my life has been turned upside down. I've had surgery and am taking chemotherapy.

I have read that cold medicines for children continue to be sold even though they have not been thoroughly tested. Sadly, some businesses are quick to put out OTC medications just to turn a profit (and a rather large one at that). After all, if it promises a miracle, what parent of a sick child wouldn't spend money for it? Unfortunately, I work in a business that uses that trick time and again. I definitely don't like the lack of standards for children's OTC cold products. For years, millions of young children have been dosed with ineffective and potentially harmful cough and cold remedies.

On a Monday morning, Phillip Marsiglia sits in a small, cramped alcove, just out of sight of the main counter at South Baltimore Pharmacy, surrounded by shelves stuffed with syringes and bandages. To his left is a pile of prescriptions. He furiously punches the keys on a computer, calling up patients' records and submitting prescriptions to pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs). When the computer shows payment approved, he shifts the prescription to a pile to his right, on top of a stack of baby formula boxes.

How long do the fatigue and "brain fog" last after general anesthesia for surgery? It depends - on your age, the specific drugs used, how long the surgery took and how healthy you were to start with. These days, most general anesthesia is short-acting, which means you wake up quickly and the drugs are mostly out of your system within a few hours, said Dr. Carl Rosow, an anesthesiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital. But tiny amounts can linger for up to seven days - enough so that you may not feel completely normal, especially if you also have a drink or two. Moreover, if you are one of the unlucky 20 percent to 40 percent of patients who have nausea and vomiting after general anesthesia, that can add considerably to your recovery time because of dehydration and weakness from not eating, said Dr. John Ulatowski, director and chair of the department of anesthesia and critical care at Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions.

If you take low-dose aspirin for your heart, can you also take ibuprofen for pain? You can, but the timing is critical. If you take ibuprofen first, it fills up the same molecular site inside platelets that aspirin binds to. If ibuprofen is already there, the aspirin can't bind, which means aspirin's potent anti-clotting action can't get started. To get around this, you can take low-dose aspirin, typically 81 milligrams, in the morning, then wait an hour or two before taking ibuprofen for pain.

That chronic groin pain sometimes felt by athletes may be called a sports hernia, but it's not really a hernia at all, according to Dr. Katherine G. Lamond, assistant professor of surgery at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and a surgeon at the University of Maryland Medical Center. She said they are different from what's normally thought of as a hernia and sometimes tough to diagnose. But once doctors determine that this is the cause, there is effective treatment. What is the difference between a sports hernia and other types of hernias?

As doctors and patients grow increasingly leery of the safety of prescription pain relievers and look for alternatives, experts say they need to bear in mind the downside of taking cheaper, over-the-counter medications. People in pain who are concerned about the safety of drugs such as the Cox-2 inhibitors Vioxx, Bextra and Celebrex should not begin to gulp down aspirin and ibuprofen, which cause tens of thousands of deaths and hospitalizations annually from gastrointestinal complications, they say. "We need to remember why Cox-2 inhibitors were invented in the first place," said Dr. Jay Goldstein, a professor of medicine at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a national expert on nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, or NSAIDs.

Jim Calhoun should be on the sidelines of a basketball court, coaching the University of Connecticut men's team. Instead, he's been on medical leave for a painful arthritic condition. Calhoun's pain is caused by spinal stenosis, a medical condition that causes narrowing of the spinal column and crowding of the nerves and affects about 1 million people in the United States each year. Dr. Lee H. Riley III, chief of the spine division and associate professor of orthopedic surgery at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, tells us about the symptoms of the disease, who typically gets it and how it is treated.

I want to thank you because your article on a potential cause of bad breath has solved a long-standing problem of mine. No doctor was able to tell me why I had halitosis, and standard tests were not useful.When I read in your column about a blood test for a germ in the stomach that causes ulcers, bad breath and gastritis, I checked with my doctor. He had never heard of this condition but he gave me the blood test and was surprised when it turned up positive. He was so interested in Helicobacter pylori that he told other doctors about it. He prescribed antibiotics to kill it.Now I am fine after years of bad breath.