I see adverts all the time, ibuprofen designed to target joint and knee pain… then the next ibuprofen one might be targeted for headaches… I always wonder whether either would do the same job as the other one as they’re both ibuprofen.
In: Chemistry
Oral medications like ibuprofen work by flooding your blood with a high enough concentration of the medication that it actually affects you’re whole body, but it only has a noticeable impact in areas that are suffering from the symptoms it’s there to treat.
It “targets” pain and inflammation inasmuch as the medication is designed to treat those symptoms. It’s not that the medication after being ingested, magically travels just to the problem areas.
Ibuprofen specifically targets inflammation. If a body part is inflamed, it probably hurts. Ibuprofen affects inflamed tissue, nullifying the pain. However, the chemical itself is in your bloodstream, and therefore is going everywhere in your body. You can’t make it focus on one body part over another.”
Other things, like Tylenol (acetaminophen), we have no clue how they work on a cellular level even now. We just know that they do. So having them “target” a specific area is even more impossible than with ibuprofen.
However, we do know that certain painkillers tend to work on different kinds of pain differently. For instance, acetaminophen does not work on inflammation, so using tylenol to aid a sprain or pulled muscle won’t help.
Ibuprofen is just an anti inflammatory. They probably run adds for joint pain to make sure people don’t think it’s just a headache medecine.
They’re all pretty much the same. There was some [litigation in Australia](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-35090087) about this a few years ago.
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