Say you’ve got a headache or some mild discomfort in the form of a sprained muscle, there’s a good chance you might go to your medicine cabinet, grab a couple of ibuprofen pills and pop them into your mouth. For many that’s a very common solution. However because of the way ibuprofen is consumed, there are some who actually get stomach upsets because of the medication.
The good news is that if that describes you, you will be very happy to learn that researchers at the University of Warwick in England have recently created what they are calling the world’s first ibuprofen patch. As you can see in the image above, this is a patch that you can stick onto your body that delivers ibuprofen into your system, similar to how a nicotine patch might work.
While ibuprofen gels do exist, the idea of the patch is to deliver a more controlled dose of the medication, plus the fact that it supposedly lasts you a good 12 hours means that you won’t have to keep constantly applying the gel and you can pretty much leave it there and forget about it for the rest of the day.
That being said the bad news is that these patches aren’t available for purchase just yet. However the researchers estimates that it might be two years before they will be available for purchase as over-the-counter pain relief medication.