Aspirin not a sleep aid

November 5, 2012 By

Q: I used to use aspirin if I had a problem sleeping in the middle of the night and it worked. Now I can’t find aspirin without NSAID stamped on the bottle, and at least three times I’ve used it to try to sleep and it makes me edgy. I looked at my mom’s old bottle of aspirin and it does NOT have NSAID on the bottle. Do you know about this? Thank you so much.

A: Aspirin is an over-the-counter pain reliever. It also has anti-coagulant properties which cause the blood to be less sticky making clotting more difficult, especially when taken in high doses over a period of time.
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Can aspirin cause bruising?

June 24, 2010 By

DEAR DR. GOTT: I am a 66-year-old female in good health. I have been on an 81 milligram aspirin a day for the last six years. I had a pacemaker inserted in 2007, owing to an electrical problem in my heart. Since then, I have had a problem I attribute to the aspirin, but I’m not sure that’s the culprit. I have blood that pools right under the skin on the lower part of my arms. The blood is very dark — almost black — and sometimes a bit raised. It takes from three to four weeks to fade away, and when it does fade, it leaves a brown spot where it was. I don’t have to hit or scrape my arm. The blood just appears. Right now, I have four large spots on my right arm near the wrist. They are most unsightly, and I have taken to covering them with Band-Aids, but then people ask me what happened to my arm. The only way to hide them would be to wear a long-sleeved blouse all the time. Since I live in Louisiana, where the summers are steamy, I just could not do that.
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