Beer May Be Better Pain Reliever Than Tylenol
As if you needed another reason to drink a cold one, new research suggests that a little beer will ease your pain better than adding some OTC pain relievers.
A study by Dr. Trevor Thompson of the University of Greenwich and published in The Journal of Pain found that raising your blood alcohol content to the legal limit of 0.08%, or about three or four glasses of beer, made your pain worse. the threshold is significant. This was according to a meta-analysis of 18 different studies examining the effect of different doses of alcohol on pain response in subjects.
Based on research, Thompson says alcohol is an effective analgesic (or pain reliever) that “provides a clinically significant reduction in pain score,” which is probably not too surprising if you’ve ever been in a bar fight or drunk. … It doesn’t hurt much when you’re three sheets downwind. However, what is surprising is that the pain relieving effect of alcohol was stronger than paracetamol, or better known as acetaminophen or Tylenol.
This doesn’t mean you have to drink six packs every time you have a headache, but it highlights an often overlooked positive aspect of drinking. Of course, if you drink too much, you just put off the pain until the next morning .