Questionable methods of pain relief have been practiced on this planet since the stone ages. Luckily, modern advancements in medicine have granted us safe and quick options for relieving pain. Analgesics, often referred to as painkillers, are drugs that work by targeting the peripheral and central nervous systems. They are important because they are responsible for alleviating our headaches, body aches, fever, and inflammation. Non-opioid analgesics include acetaminophen and non- steroidal inflammatory drugs (NSAIDS) such as aspirin; they are typically used for mild pain. Opioid based analgesics such as morphine and codeine are used for chronic pain. NSAIDs function by inhibiting cyclooxygenase (COX) 1 and 2, which are enzymes that convert …show more content…
The drawback is that column chromatography is very time consuming; one way to combat this is to utilize flash chromatography, which involves a nitrogen pressure stream pushing the mobile phase through the column. The differences in polarity allow for the effective separation of the various components. The more polar compounds adhere to the polar silica or alumina stationary phase for a longer time. The less polar components elute first and then the polarity of the solvent is increased in order to elute the more polar compounds. Collecting small fractions is essential in column chromatography because they can be combined together; large fractions can lead to multiple compounds in a specific fraction. The purpose of this experiment was to isolate the three components of Excedrin using column chromatography. Thin layer chromatography (TLC) was used to determine when each of the components had been fully eluted from the column. If there was an overlap in fractions between two components, liquid- liquid extraction was done to separate them. The compounds were characterized via NMR instrumentation and the percent recovery for each compound was calculated to determine whether the isolation was