Too much

ryan1671

If i take 4 advil will it be to much

DevoutlyApathetic

An actual serious answer is it is super complicated. To start with a quick question is how many mg of ibuprofen the pills have.

Quick googling means you can take 800 mg at once without a problem, with normal advil that would be 4 pills. If they're extra strength pills it's probably half that. Don't take that maximum dose more than 4 times in a day and that is with spacing them out. (At least 4 hours between doses, should be more like 6 hours.)

If it's an ongoing thing or you start having an upset stomach you should probably stop and seek actual real medical advice from not internet strangers.

knitdan

Follow the directions on the package. Do not take more than the recommended dose.

Hevach

Doctors will sometimes prescribe higher doses of over the counter painkillers or higher dose prescription versions of them in lieu of more aggressive measures like opiates or narcotics, sometimes for people with a history of negative reactions, a risk of addiction, or sometimes just because prescribing controlled substances is an annoying hassle and every patient they can downgrade to alternating Tylenol and ibuprofen every three hours is one less potential visit from the DEA.

Excessive doses should be treated as a prescription drug because they literally *are* a prescription drug.

As a short term self medicating measure, alternating an NSAID like aspirin or ibuprofen with Tylenol halfway through the dose time (so every three hours) is safer than taking a higher does of one or the other, and is especially effective for reducing fever. Even then, if you're doing this for more than a couple days, you're solidly in the realm of needing more serious pain management.

Kruite

You can be a little less draconian with ibuprofen (ie Advil) doses. Its Tylenol that you need to be careful with purely because the byproduct of your liver breaking it down is toxic.

Fiendishrabbit

Kruite wrote: »

You can be a little less draconian with ibuprofen (ie Advil) doses. Its Tylenol that you need to be careful with purely because the byproduct of your liver breaking it down is toxic.

Paracetamol (the active substance in Tylenol) will absolutely murder your liver if you overdose (and the "murder your liver" dose is really close to the dosages used in actual treatment) and long term overuse will murder your liver anyway over time. There is a reason why paracetamol is the no.1. killer when it comes to medical overdoses (to the point where it's no longer legal to buy them in Sweden without a prescription).

With ibuprofen it is indeed less draconian. An overdose will simply leave you with intestinal bleeding, diarrhea and possibly believing that you've overdosed on opiods (shortness of breath, low bloodpressure, dizziness, blurred vision etc). So...not nice. However, the gap between effective dose and overdose is much larger than with paracetamol, but still.

Lets just say it like this:
1. If you haven't achieved a painkilling effect with 400mg (2 advils) of ibuprofen you're not going to achieve it with 4. NSAIDs don't work that way, it's not morphine. Unless you weight crazymuch you've achieved a maximum effective dose with 2.
2. Unless using a prescription 6 per day (1200mg) is the recommended limit. If used as a painkiller/bloodthinner you're sometimes given higher doses by a doctor...but on your own, don't. You'll just give yourself the runs.

kaliyama

Every week or so we get a new account created with a name that’s often a version of a proper name that asks an unusual question, and the formatting and writing style is often somewhat similar. What’s going on?

Iruka

The honest truth is that this forum now eclipses most others when searching for "advice forum" in google, so while H/A receives more spam than it used to, its also seeing more, seemingly non-community related people swinging by.

If you have a concern about spam or trolling, the same rules apply as do everywhere, please simply report it.

Also I'm going to close this thread, the only good advice that could be given further is to consult your doctor, and follow dosage directions on the package.