I have a pretty high pain tolerance, and I don't usually take something to dull pain. Two weeks ago, while running electrical wire to the workshop in my back yard, I smashed by left index finger, and I didn't even ice it. It's still tender, and it reminds me that I smashed it, but I didn't take anything for it, whiskey or oxycodone, and I'm fine. Sometimes however I do take painkillers, not because I can't do without them but because I can't do something I must do while the pain persists. I need to work sometimes when the pain interferes, and so I find that, in a pinch, since I don't rely on painkillers that aspirin serves me best. In many ways, although it is one of the original and simplest of painkillers, it is superior to all others contrived by people. It is natural, and it is simple, and simplicity is often the ultimate sophistication (Leonardo da Vinci). Unlike some of the other medications, aspirin technically never expires in its ability to kill pain even when it changes form. Finally, it's so easy to find and cheap to make, that if you can get away with using it, it's really the best bet and the surest, even if it's not quick and even if you must take multiple doses.
From a cost-benefit perspective, aspirin is the cheapest way to kill pain. I mean, they even put aspirin in some of the other pill cocktails, and you can get generic aspirin anywhere any time; we even have it in some of our first aid kits. When I do the aspirin lab in chemistry, we always compare a new bottle to an expired one to show them that drugs don't technically "expire"; they change into something else. Aspirin is easy and cheap to make, and it's not bottled with a special brand. It is useful everywhere, and it's even sold by Bayer for heart disease. Sure, like all drugs, it comes with possible health risks, and dulling pain isn't as good as eliminating the reason why you hurt in the first place, but if you can kill pain with the cheapest and most ubiquitous pill available, that's a huge win. We need other drugs because most people overuse pain killers, and some people abuse prescriptions. Even when I was seriously injured years back, they only put me on ibuprofin, but you can also take aspirin WITH some other painkillers and it won't interfere with them, making aspirin the best, the least likely to cause dependence, and something that always CAN work, even if it doesn't clear up everything or at least everything completely. Multiple doses are much cheaper than other drugs, but we like to pay for the convenience of taking one pill all day, and you pay for it in more ways than money. We like to kill pain quickly, and aspirin isn't that quick, but it's also the least toxic way to kill pain in cells.
Aspirin is derived from an all-natural source. Long ago, old wives knew that if you chewed on willow bark it would dull pain, and eventually scientists recovered salicylic acid, the active ingredient, from willow as the causative agent. This means that the main precursor to aspirin is not only all-natural, but it's also 100% organic. Aspirin itself is then artisanal, because it's manufactured by people from the salicylic acid through an acetylation reaction. This is done because salicylic acid is irritating to the stomach. So, the manmade derivative is "gentler" on the stomach by pre-reacting it with something to keep it from reacting with you in a way that you don't desire. Of course other pain killers are even more gentle, and willows don't make salicylic acid to make our lives easier, but aspirin is made from concentrated vinegar and willow bark extract, which sounds like something you'd find at Whole Foods next to the wheatgrass. Both of its ingredients are perfectly safe for people, but it gets vilified anyway. In our culture now that potted plants and macrobiotic food, vegan diets, bikram yoga, and the plethora of esoteric solutions, aspirin is really the only natural and pure and vegan source to kill pain among the pills produced for pain. I know there are other things that work too that are not pills, and you can always suck willow bark if that floats your boat, but it really deserves a resurgence in this community under those auspices.
When aspirin "expires" it's still useful. Acetyl-salicylic acid breaks down by the release of the acetyl group as aforementioned, leaving its predecessor- salyicylic acid, which is also a painkiller. You can tell if you're aspirin is going bad because when you open the cap you'll be able to smell vinegar, which is evidence of the reverse reaction. It's why they sell the bottle with a cotton plug, so that the cotton reacts with the air rather than the pills and keeps the pills in useful condition longer. Even then, it just changes the painkiller from one to another. Sometimes when I take other painkillers, I don't feel like they're working, and they don't seem to have any effect at all. However, aspirin, when it expires, turns into a different painkiller, and even though it's weaker it's still going to dull pain. Friday morning I awoke with a headache left over from Thursday night, and when I got to work, I took some acetylsalicylic acid (aspirin) and within a few hours I felt fine. Now, the bottle says the pills expired in 2014, but I know that it's still a painkiller even if it's not the one I think it is on the bottle. For this reason, I think stockpiling aspirin is your best bet. Ok, maybe you need aleve or excedrin normally, but those medications really do stop killing pain when they expire, so they just make your urine more toxic if you take them after they expire. At least aspirin will still help dull your pain even if it's years after the bottle says it's bad. When other drugs change form, they cease to be painkillers, and maybe they become more dangerous derivatives than the pain you desired originally to dispel.
Despite its advantages, aspirin continues to take a back seat. It's inconvenient, weak, passe, and just not what people desire, not when you can take something powerful or if you're addicted either to the substance itself or the money you can make selling pills illegally. Nobody deals in aspirin after market, and I'm the only person I know who stockpiles aspirin, but that's one of my favorite labs to teach. We extract willow bark, make aspirin, and test the pills and show that the natural product is present in the pills and even moreso as they degrade. It's an easy test, it's a quick lab, and it is important because some students will find themselves giving "expired" medication in a clinical setting and need to know that the expiration date is really the date on which they can no longer guarantee that the medication contains 100% of the dose of the product we purchase. It may still be useful, and as far as I know aspirin is always useful. It worked for me Friday, despite being expired almost FOUR YEARS AGO. Next time I'll experiment with an older bottle, and I'll continue to show to classes for years to come that aspirin pills still contain aspirin long after you would normally toss them aside. Maybe I like aspirin so much because it reminds me of me- that somehow something useful can be resurrected from me, even if I don't feel useful or even if other people decide they'd rather try elsewhere.
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