So the joke goes, “I drink to make the pain go away.” It’s obviously a light hearted joke playing at the fact that most of our worries drive us to drink alcohol.
Well, it turns out that the saying is not a joke anymore and is a factual statement.
A new study suggests that a couple beers relieves pain more effectively than over the counter painkillers.
Dr. Trevor Thompson from the University of Greenwich led a study that was published in The Journal of Pain and it found that when you raise your alcohol level to the legal limit of .08% your pain threshold increases significantly.
Dr. Thompson concluded these results from an analysis of 18 different scientific studies that looked at the pain response of subjects who drank different amounts of alcohol.
The research showed that alcohol “delivers clinically-relevant reductions in ratings of pain intensity” and the pain relieving of alcohol was found to be more effective than that of paracetamol, or what’s more commonly known as acetaminophen or Tylenol.
Now, this is when alcohol is consumed at .08%, which is likely 3 or 4 beers for most people.
So this study isn’t suggesting you throw back a 24-pack every time you get a headache, but a couple beers definitely won’t hurt.
Just be careful because you might be in more pain the next morning than when you started if you get out of control.
