I bet most families have a bottle of aspirin in their house somewhere. I know a lot of people prefer other pain relievers, like Advil or Tylenol, but I still think that people keep a little bottle of aspirin in their medicine cabinet. It’s a carryover from the old days when there were not many alternatives.
One of the problems with aspirin is that it thins your blood. So if you are taking aspirin for a toothache and then the dentist has to pull the tooth, sometimes he can’t do it right away because of the risk of excessive bleeding. This happened to a friend of mine. If he had not been taking aspirin for several days before seeing the dentist, he could have had the tooth pulled and on the road to recovery. But since he had taken so much, the dentist sent him home for 4 more days of pain AND orders to not take any pain relievers. Then he went back and got the tooth pulled. That was a long painful ordeal and I did not know that aspirin would have contributed to the problem.