Tylenol is popular and safe. We explain how the drug works in the body

www.usatoday.com

On Sept. 22, Donald Trump pushed an unproven link between Tylenol and an increase in autism in children, and he issued an urgent warning to expectant mothers not to take the medication.

What do we know about the drug? Tylenol is used to treat a several conditions, such as mild to moderate pain, fever, headaches, muscle aches, toothaches, backaches and colds. According to medical experts, when taken as directed, traditional over-the-counter pain relievers like acetaminophen and nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory medicines (NSAIDs) can be safe and effective.

Tylenol wasn't widely used until 1950, when Tylenol Elixir for Children, a prescription medication at first, was promoted as an aspirin substitute, according to Tufts University School of Medicine. Acetaminophen, often sold under the brand name Tylenol, had long been considered the safest option for managing headaches, fever and other pain during pregnancy.

15 comments

Safe is maybe not the best word… you can still kill your liver and die in pain from a normal sized bottle
- You can kill yourself by drinking too much water too.
  
  Sure but thats difficult. You can just spend 5min eating tylenol like they were skittles and you’re done.
- May I ask - what is a normal-sized bottle?
  In the UK the OTC limit is 16 pills.
  
  Normal at walmart:
  Normal at Costco:
  
  Here in North America small-ish bottles will usually contain like 50 pills. Can be 100. Then there are the bigger bottles, like 500 pills in one. All OTC.
A pile of idiots are saying a bunch of lies. To counteract this, we're putting the facts out there so that people can be informed.
This isn't how you fix the goddamn issue. No one that heard that shit and believed it is going to be convinced by actual facts. Try something else.
- Yeah, they don't believe it because they lack facts, they believe it because Trump says it. They were perfectly fine with tylenol before he said anything, and they don't have the slightest interest in why it should be bad, as long as Trump says it, it is gospel truth.
It's as proven as a lot of epidemiology. The White House referenced a paper talking about acetaminophen and pregnancy, it was a meta-analysis of epidemiological studies. That's not very rigorous. However, it's the same level of rigor used to demonize red meat consumption.
So you're either in the camp that epidemiology is not serious science, and should not be used for public policy. Which is fine, that's a reasonable place to be
Or you're in the camp that some epidemiology should be used for public policy, which then this acetaminophen link should be taken seriously.
I'm personally not compelled by weak epidemiology, so I don't think any of it should be used for public policy. And especially politicians shouldn't get in the business of pumping epidemiology.
However, this USA today article does not disprove anything. It can't. You can't prove the negative. Is acetaminophen safe at all Dose levels during pregnancy? I don't know, it should be minimized unless it's necessary, but I don't know the dose dependent response. That would require an interventional trial. It would be reasonable to not take any drugs during pregnancy unless they're absolutely medically necessary, and not use simply as a panacea which acetaminophen is often used as
I do find it odd that The article uses the fact that acetaminophen is very popular so it's safe. Otherwise, we'd be seeing a widespread problem, but that's exactly what the acetaminophen research paper was saying.... They're kind of arguing against that premise
Popular? Why should that matter?
Is it aspirin that we don’t know the mechanism behind? There was a common one that I learned didn’t have a clear mechanism known.
- It's acetaminophen. That said, it's definitely known to NOT affect DNA in existing humans, and autism existed way before Tylenol or Paracetamol were used commonly.
  
  Wow. Seems ripe for someone to build misinformation off of that fact. Even with the points you have made. Those should cancel things out.
  There’s this problem related to the further exploration an understanding of the world where a certain set of people see it as inventing the things we have discovered or categorized. And if they don’t see it as invented, they see it as having only appeared recently. Autism is one of those things.
  Correlation is not always causation and all that.
It also lowers empathy.

15 comments