It may come as a surprise that two of the most used painkillers against headaches today - paracetamol and ibuprofen - have only been available to headache patients for a few decades. Even though the invention of paracetamol dates all the way back to 1878, the painkiller didn’t appear on the market until 1950. This was mainly because of increasing public concern about the toxicity of non-prescription drugs in those years.
In the 1960s and 1970s, however, scientists discovered it was safe to occasionally use painkillers like paracetamol.L.F. Prescott, ‘Paracetamol: past, present, and future’, American Journal of Therapeutics, 7:2 (2000), 143-147. Because of this discovery, the market for non-prescription drugs exploded. Soon, headache patients had a lot of non-prescription painkillers to choose from, making it easier and often more effective to use over-the-counter medicines against headaches than consulting a professional. This was mainly because doctors often didn’t know (and often still don’t know) what the most effective treatment for their patient’s headache complaints was.
Especially from the 1970s on, self-medicating became a common practice among migraine sufferers and other headache patients. This was mainly because of the invention of ibuprofen, a drug that proved to be very effective in treating headaches.D. Connelly, ‘A brief history of ibuprofen’, The Pharmaceutical Journal, https://pharmaceutical-journal.com/article/infographics/a-brief-history-of-ibuprofen, (URL visited on October 29, 2022). Soon, many different drugs containing ibuprofen came on the market. Pills combining ibuprofen and caffeine (sold under names such as Advil and Nurofen) became very popular and are still today.