Does Ibuprofen Cause Future Headaches? Yet Another Correlational Study on Suspension

Does ibuprofen prevent future headaches?

If you're over 40, you probably have multiple bottles of ibuprofen in your car, in your bag, in your house, in different rooms in your house.

And ibuprofen is great if you have aches and pains, if you have headaches.

And if you were to study whether people who take ibuprofen are more likely to get headaches in the future than people who don't take ibuprofen, I bet you would find a correlation.

I bet you would find that people who take more ibuprofen are actually more likely to get more headaches.

So does that mean that ibuprofen doesn't work?

Well, I saw another study, somebody sent me this study called An Empirical Examination of the Effects of Suspension and Suspension Severity on Behavioral and Academic Outcomes.

I've been talking a lot lately about exclusionary discipline, and this is yet another study, and this one's fairly high quality, yet another study of what happens to students after they receive exclusionary discipline like suspension.

And this study looked at both in-school and out-of-school suspension, both short and long-term, in New York City over a nine-year period.

And what they found was that, not surprisingly, students who receive more severe consequences tend to later receive more severe consequences.

And this study particularly bugs me because what they're arguing is that they have found a causal relationship.

They're arguing that they have found and kind of proven that more severe consequences cause more severe consequences and presumably more severe behaviors later.

In other words, we're making things worse for the student by giving them a consequence.

And I'd like you to think about whether that really makes sense.

I mean, it's essentially the argument that taking ibuprofen for your headache now is causing you to have a headache in the future.

And you might think, well, no, it's just that people who tend to have more headaches take more ibuprofen, and people who have headaches at one point in time tend to be the same people who have more headaches later.

It's not evidence of causation.

And what this study has really found is what everybody knows anyway, is that the same students tend to struggle with behavior over and over and over again.

And that's very frustrating to us as educators.

We don't like that we don't really have a way to change student behavior.

But it's a straw man argument to say that suspension is guaranteed or promised to change student behavior.

knew what we could do to permanently change student behavior, we would do it.

But nobody is saying that suspension is actually capable of that.

What we are saying is that suspension is essential for keeping the school environment safe.

If somebody is unsafe, if they're hurting other people, they need to go home for a while.

Will that dramatically improve their lives?

No, probably not.

But we don't have an alternative.

And it's especially important to note that what this study is not saying is that there is something else we can do instead that will keep the school environment safe and that will change things or at least, you know, not result in recurrence.

So send me more studies if you have them, but this is yet another one that does not show what it claims to show.

Let me know what you think.