prayers please...

[johnniet]

The night of Thursday, 9/30/04, I heard some pompous jackass on the NBC Nightly News, a Naderite author of the "Good Pills - Bad Pills " book pontificating about how the Cox 2 Inhibitors are no better than Ibuprofen for dealing with arthritis pain. A Hell of a lot that idiot knows! It takes me at least 600mg. of Ibuprofen in the morning and 600mg more at 3-4 times more during the day to equal 12.5 mg of Vioxx taken in the AM and again in the PM.

Let me second this too. Different drugs can be better for different people with the "same" condition. The first drug I was put on for RA was sulphasalazine. It was reasonably effective, but the recommended dose made me very sick. Eventually we found a dose I could pretty much live with but I still had side effects--my sleep was even worse than without the medicine, I was irritable all the time. Yuck. After a couple of years (!) I was put on the "daring", "dangerous" methotrexate, which at much higher doses is toxic. Every couple of months I have to take a liver enzyme test. They've been normal every single time. It turns out that the people who really get liver damage from it are almost always people who (1) drink a lot, or (2) have some other liver condition.

How hard is it for you to get into the OSU medical library? You can do all kinds of research in a place like that. Start off with a pubmed search on this medicine her doctor is interested in--but don't just go by the first few article titles. Some articles will show good effects. Some will show bad effects. But usually the effects are small, or only apply to some patients (and they don't know why), or the studies are too small to draw firm conclusions.
Get working, but be patient with yourself. You'll be spending a lot of the next 10 years working with these kinds of questions. Get informed.