A social analgesic? Acetaminophen (paracetamol) reduces positive empathy | Hacker News Reader

A social analgesic? Acetaminophen (paracetamol) reduces positive empathy

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

144 pointsamichail117 comments

Acetaminophen (paracetamol) is also associated with reductions in 'social pain'.[0]

> Thus, acetaminophen reduces behavioral and neural responses associated with the pain of social rejection, demonstrating substantial overlap between social and physical pain.

It's a fascinating idea that social pain and physical pain are so strongly related. That depression can be viewed as a form of chronic pain, like a knee that still hurts long after the injury has healed.

And perhaps then positive empathy has something to do with literally feeling the social pain of others- blunt your ability to feel social pain and you aren't as affected by it.

[0]https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/095679761037474...

That’s been known for a long time, possibly centuries.

morphine was used to treat depression as late as last century, and probably remains a common folk remedy even today.

Morphine has more effects than just killing pain, however. It also provides a euphoric feeling. It's more interesting if a drug that was until now only known for removing physical pain can also provide relief for social pain.

It only does for a brief honeymoon phase. Then it's mostly a pain killer (chronic pain sufferer.)

Well yes, there’s definitely a reason there are problems with opiate addictions.

A differentiation between legal and illegal drugs is the legal ones poison you before they make you feel particularly amazing, the illegal ones poison you after. Take way too much acetaminophen and you get liver failure before you feel euphoria.

There are arguments to be made that many illegal drugs are safer at effective doses but have risks of abuse not present in the drugs that poison you before abuse is fun.

Depending on "who" you listen to Wild Lettuce is either no good or its better than morphine without the addiction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactuca_virosa https://erowid.org/plants/lactuca/lactuca.shtml

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactucarium#History

So with man made chemicals they tend to not break down as easily, you see this with man made pesticides like pyrethrin's yet the pyrethrin's in Chrysanthemum do break down easily, organophosphates (nerve agents at the right dose) are another group used to dip Sheep in, but might show up in trace amounts in lanolin based Vit D3 supplements.

Aren't emotions just thoughts with a linked physical sensation?

Why is it so fascinating?

Just?

I didn’t mean to downplay the intensity and effect of emotion.

I found it strange that others don’t acknowledge emotions for what they are at a basic level and instead talk about them like they are some supernatural perception.

What? Emotion doesn't have physical sensation, unless you mean "heart pumping strongly when afraid".

Most people experience emotional body sensations - “butterflies in my stomach,” “a weight on my chest,” “steam coming out of my ears” etc.

Really curious to learn how you perceive emotions. Maybe I'm reading into this too much, but this feels like the start of discussing an aphantasia analog.

Well, I don't visualize at all, so you could be on to something.

To attempt to answer your question, I don't know how to describe it. Until now, I would have attempted to use the language of "physical metaphor" that I had heard and read, but if those aren't metaphors... I have no idea how to describe something that is to me, by definition, indescribable. I can only really describe the effects I suppose, that being angry makes me desire violence, being sad or afraid makes me want to hide, etc.

Thank you for taking the time to share. I really enjoy learning how other people experience the world. There are so many times when I've made an assumption based on my own life and was greeted with a surprise when I came to learn something new.

Don’t people with facial paralysis say that their feelings of emotions are, not functioning at full capacity, due to inability to express them outwardly?

Or, something like that?

I have heard something similar.

People get together to fake laugh and end up happy at the end of the session.

@WaxedChewbacca re:meditation, if your advertisement for meditation is that it will make me feel physical pain when I experience emotions, then that's a great motivation to never ever try to meditate ever. It's also almost completely the opposite of anything I've ever read about meditation. Isn't the whole point to disconnect from emotion and suffering?

If you are practicing mindfulness meditation the whole point is just to observe.

Alcohol too. And both tough on the liver, mere coincidence I suppose.

As a drinker, I stick to ibuprofen. I wonder if it's as good for social pain.

I wonder if that's not also bad for your liver. Ifnyiu take if for the hangover, I really recommend drinking a lot of water before going to bed instead, it makes wonders.

It isn't just about being "bad for your liver" - combining alcohol and acetaminophen can literally kill you.

If you've drank enough over the years to permanently damage your liver, there are ton of medications you can no longer take (and ibuprofen is one of them), but if your liver is still working properly, taking ibuprofen is safe - even with alcohol.

No, I try to not get hung-over enough to need analgesics. But I have persistent back problems, and taking Tylenol for it regularly would probably cause some compounding liver damage. Ibuprofen is, fwiw, much harder on the stomach - but not toxic to the liver. That's why it's the go-to-side-dish for alkies with a breakfast burrito.

> drinking a lot of water

and b vitamins (b12 seems to have the greatest effect on reducing hangovers, and i've heard alcoholics tend to be b6 deficient so can't go wrong w that too)

B12 is indeed a hangover cure. In Las Vegas, there are food truck style vans that drive down the Strip in the morning and give people B12 injections. In Australia there's a dissolvable seltzer tablet called Berocca (made by Bayer) which everyone takes the night they're getting drunk. For some reason, the same Berocca tablets in America have less vitamin-B, and include ginseng, and are twice as expensive as they are Down Under. But in America there's a thing called "Emergen-C" which while not marketed as a hangover medicine has almost the exact same B6/12 and C proportions as Berocca in Australia. I figured this out after awhile when my band's drummer kept "smuggling" Australian Berocca back to the States for us. Which just shows it does work, a little.

FYI:

Acetaminophen a.k.a. Paracetamol N-acetyl-para-aminophenol (APAP) : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paracetamol

Ethanol (Ethyl Alcohol) : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol

Cytochrome P450 (Metabolism) : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cytochrome_P450

search: >list:'Cytochrome P450 Interaction'< @DDG : <https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/?q=list:'Cytochrome P450 In...>

search: >scholar:'Acetaminophen (N-acetyl-para-aminophenol, Paracetamol, APAP) Toxicity'< @DDG :

<https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/?q=scholar:'Acetaminophen (...>

Alcohol damage of liver is indirect. The blood from intestine containig absorbed nutrients and whatever else got into it goes to liver first for the first line processing and neutralization. Alcohol loosens the intestine epithelium and lets the gut microbiome to get into the blood. This causes an inflamation, which if is chronic leads to the liver disease.

>It's a fascinating idea that social pain and physical pain are so strongly related.

This reminded me of: "Social rejection shares somatosensory representations with physical pain"

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1102693108

2016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14683173

2020 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25540870

Thanks! Macroexpanded:

In study, acetaminophen makes risky moves seem less dangerous - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25540870 - Dec 2020 (133 comments)

Acetaminophen reduces empathy for pain (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14683173 - July 2017 (93 comments)

Others:

Prenatal acetaminophen increases autism and ADHD risk 20% - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27362768 - June 2021 (20 comments)

Acetaminophen exposure in pregnancy linked to higher risk of ADHD, autism: study - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21415078 - Nov 2019 (39 comments)

Acetaminophen use in pregnancy linked to child's behavioral problems - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12293675 - Aug 2016 (84 comments)

Acetaminophen may hinder the brain's error-correction mechanisms - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11465452 - April 2016 (56 comments)

Acetaminophen and the War on Drugs (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2211599 - Feb 2011 (58 comments)

Pain is psychosomatic. A broken heart physically hurts, and a broken bone will ruin your mood. A similar result was found in parents with opiate abuse disorder, they were less likely to notice negative emotional states when shown pictures of children in various moods. I don't think this result is concerning except for people who are taking NSAIDs on a daily basis for long periods of time.

> and a broken bone will ruin your mood

Curious thing I've noticed - physical ailments had very little effect on my mood as a child, but have a significant impact on my mood in my 30s. Something even as simple as a cold can make me unwilling to be helpful, empathetic, etc now.

Why is this?

I believe we're able to reframe pain and regulate its emotional impacts through conscious reasoning. If that's right, you can change the way pain is impacting your moods.

Maybe these would interest you:

1. Cerebral cortex modulation of pain, Acta Pharmacologica Sinica

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4006538/

2. Let it be: mindful acceptance down-regulates pain and negative emotion, Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience

https://academic.oup.com/scan/article/14/11/1147/5716281

It also reduces compensatory affirmation:

The Common Pain of Surrealism and Death: Acetaminophen Reduces Compensatory Affirmation Following Meaning Threats

https://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~heine/docs/2013%20Acetaminophen%2...

> They ... watched a 4-min clip from the short film Rabbits, created by David Lynch (2002)

> acetaminophen interrupts the typical compensatory responses to meaning threats ...

> acetaminophen has more far-reaching psychological consequences than previously realized

Though not a huge n, n=121.

You have to suspect that the underlying reason people are taking a pain reliever in the first place also makes them less empathetic to others. That could even be a larger effect than the one found in the study.

Understand that's controlled for in the OA, just mentioning another aspect in real-life situations.

Are you saying that you think people who want relief from their own pain are people who have reduced empathy toward others?

It might be that just being in pain yourself can lower your empathy. For example your body could raise pain threshold a bit so it's easier for you to suffer your pain which could cause empathetic pain not to register at all.

In this experiment participants didn't get to choose whether they would get paracetamol or not, so that shouldn't be a factor.

Right, I mentioned it was controlled for. I meant people not in a study, that are in pain, being less empathetic to others.

The study showed that people taking this drug became less empathetic, due to the drug, not the pain. I'm saying there is an additional consideration based on experiencing pain, that you then may or may not take drugs for, but that has its own effect.

Another study linking these. The prospect of humans in some places maybe experiencing different things and making different decisions than they would've because for a couple generations everyone has been taking a ton of Tylenol and it reduced everyone's collective empathy... that is terrifying to me.

What’s terrifying to me is the casual nature of use of this powerful drug. Even for the slightest pain we’ll take a couple of basically free pills and think nothing of it. The older you get the more power you have the more aches and pains the less empathy.

Huh. Explains a bit! :)

The links with adhd and autism are scary too.

My hypochondriac mother guzzled these pills like candy.

It would be interesting to see a study on whether Tylenol reduces empathy in people who are sick/in chronic pain. My guess would be that Tylenol increases empathy in these situations, despite the general effect it has in reducing empathy. It's hard to empathize with others when you're in pain yourself.

Brings about a good question - if you have a headache, and you take Tylenol, do you become more or less empathetic? If the answer is you become more empathetic, that indicates that instead of Tylenol being the bad guy, we should try to reduce the prevalence of headaches (or pains that cause people to take Tylenol) in general.

Sounds like a hack for people with social anxiety as well.

Recently I read about using paracetamol for social anxiety. There is a connection.

Paracetamol and Acetaminophen are the same drug - much of the world calls it Paracetamol. Different takes on the same chemical name, though I can't remember the reason for the difference. I looked it up some years ago when I moved from the US to Europe.

Well yes, if you're a fan of hypogonadism.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5044981/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5789927/

That’s quite a leap. One of those is for ibuprofen, which has virtually no similarities with acetaminophen and the first one is for a xenograft model - there are tremendous problems with getting carried away with that result as you seem to have done.

That second link seems to suggest the effect in adults is very minimal.

When I can't sleep because my mind is racing, or I am anxious about something, I take 1000mg of acetaminophen, the stress is relieved, and within an hour I am asleep.

When bad things happen to me, or I'm anxious about something, I take 1000mg of acetaminophen and the stress is quickly blunted.

Acetaminophen is a miracle drug for psychological pain, and it is very safe if used occasionally in small doses (as described above).

I use weed for both these cases—shutting my mind up so I can sleep and/or dulling physical pain in case of illness so I can sleep, if it doesn't rise to the level of needing/being-able-to-get serious painkillers, plus (at lower doses, and far less often) for reducing anxiety during waking hours.

Works great, wish I'd started years ago. Leaves me much better-rested in the morning than other prescription sleep aids I've tried. On nights when I know I'll have a nice 9ish hours uninterrupted, I pair it with a little melatonin to keep me from waking up completely if I stir a little after the weed's worn off, and it's the best damn sleep of my life.

A+++++ would recommend. Screw you for lying to me, William S. Sessions.

When it became legal here several years ago, I tried it out a bunch. Turns out I'm the kind of person that cannabis generally makes anxious/paranoid. Probably for the best, but I'm kind of bummed it isn't as fun as people always made it out to be.

I don't think 1000mg is a small dose, I'm not a doctor but that seems like an extra-strength portion to me

The "standard dosage unit" in Canada is 325 mg (for adults), with extra-strength pills containing 500 or 650 mg.

1000 mg is pushing the daily limit (4000 mg, but it's got a halflife of ~6 hrs, so...)

1,000 milligrams is not "pushing the daily limit". That is a normal adult dose and by a wide margin within what is considered safe for even chronic daily use.

Like many people, when I have a headache or a sore muscle I take the dose recommended on the Tylenol bottle: 1,000 milligrams. It is not even remotely dangerous.

Furthermore, if the original commenter is using acetaminophen to reduce rare psychological pain the margin of safety is even larger because she's using it only rarely.

The normal adult dose is 300-600mg every 4-6 hrs, with a max dose of 3 (formerly 4) g/day. It's right on their webpage: https://www.tylenolprofessional.com/adult-dosage If you want something more formal, Medscape has pretty much the same numbers: https://reference.medscape.com/drug/tylenol-acetaminophen-34...

A one-off 1000mg is, as you say, fine but if you're maintaining at that level, you are literally right at the DNE limit.

TYLENOL® Extra Strength Caplets

Acetaminophen

500 mg (in each caplet)

2 caplets every 6 hours

The standard size of a Paracetamol (as it is known in the UK[0]) tablet in the UK is 500mg.

The normal dose is 2 tablets (i.e. 1000mg in total).

Wait at least 4 hours between doses.

Don't have more than 4 doses in a 24-hour period.

Paracetamol is one of the most commonly used medicines in the UK.

[0] - https://www.nhs.uk/medicines/paracetamol-for-adults/

Seems the UK has higher dosages. The UK recommended limit is 4000mg in 24 hours.

Tylenol Extra Strength (acetaminophen, aka paracetamol) is also 500mg, but the recommended limit is 6 tablets (3000mg) in 24 hours.

Acetaminophen has an active dose very close to the lethal dose, and is the leading cause of acute liver failure in the United States. While the daily limit is 4000mg, 1000mg is not un-common in formulations like extra-strength Tylenol.

> it is very safe if used occasionally in small doses (as described above).

Define occasionally, and small doses. Paracetamol/acetaminophen is widely considered to be dangerous for a few reasons - sustained use of "safe" dosages has been shown to have a huge effect on liver failure [0] - it's regularly found in other painkiller, cold & flu, decongestant, and antihistamines. - It's surprisingly ineffective for a large number of people for lots of different kinds of pain - The dosage that can cause critical liver damage is _dangerously_ close to the therapeutic dose.

[0] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40264-012-0013-7

Commenter was explicit about dosage and pretty clear about frequency. A single dose of 1,000 milligrams in a 24 hour period is indeed small and universally considered to be safe for people with a normal liver.

I take an anti-histamine. They don’t usually make me drowsy, but if I am wake at 3AM and feel too awake, the anti-histamine is usually enough to push me back to sleep (although it isn’t immediate).

Antihistamines like Benadryl are anticholinergics. They are harmful to the brain and everyone should avoid them. In contrast acetaminophen is universally considered to be safe for people with a normal liver.

I believe it is a personal responsibility to judge the costs and benefits of any medication (prescription or not). Absolutely, take care with Benadryl/Diphenhydramine (more commonly a cough&cold medicine), paracetamol, or any other antihistamines you may use.

Another drug you might want to consider is Cebocap[1]. It has a very safe side-effect profile, it's safe for pregnant and nursing women, and it has been clinically proven to effectively treat a wide variety of ailments.

[1] https://www.drugs.com/imprints/forest-707-17216.html

Trazodone is a much safer prescription sleep aid. For non-prescription rhodiola or ashgawandha maybe, but if you're anxious about something it's much better to get rid of the source of the anxiety.

Have you tried guided meditation videos for sleeping?

Related and more accessible article from BBC Future (must read) - The medications that change who we are : https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200108-the-medications-...

Excerpt:

Mischkowski’s own research has uncovered a sinister side-effect of paracetamol. For a long time, scientists have known that the drug blunts physical pain by reducing activity in certain brain areas, such as the insular cortex, which plays an important role in our emotions. These areas are involved in our experience of social pain, too – and intriguingly, paracetamol can make us feel better after a rejection.

Mischkowski wondered whether painkillers might be making it harder to experience empathy

And recent research has revealed that this patch of cerebral real-estate is more crowded than anyone previously thought, because it turns out the brain’s pain centres also share their home with empathy.

For example, fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) scans have shown that the same areas of our brain become active when we’re experiencing “positive empathy” –pleasure on other people’s behalf – as when we’re experiencing pain.

Given these facts, Mischkowski wondered whether painkillers might be making it harder to experience empathy. Earlier this year, together with colleagues from Ohio University and Ohio State University, he recruited some students and spilt them into two groups. One received a standard 1,000mg dose of paracetamol, while the other was given a placebo. Then he asked them to read scenarios about uplifting experiences that had happened to other people, such as the good fortune of “Alex”, who finally plucked up the courage to ask a girl on a date (she said yes).

The results revealed that paracetamol significantly reduces our ability to feel positive empathy – a result with implications for how the drug is shaping the social relationships of millions of people every day. Though the experiment didn’t look at negative empathy – where we experience and relate to other people’s pain – Mischkowski suspects that this would also be more difficult to summon after taking the drug.

I have BPD and I self medicate with low dose Paracetamol. It makes me feel less mental pain and also less guilt/empathy that is in excess for others. It helps me function better than my medication which is quite funny.

Would you please share dosage, and maybe other circumstances? I'm really curious what you do and what effects you experience.

1000mg doses in the morning and evening. I was on Effexor and self-medicating with opioids ocassionally. The BPD is from childhood. Since Paracetamol experiment I dropped all the other drugs, I am totally functional and focused on my work now (the mental anguish was distracting and unmotivating). I am sure this is not good for my liver but I could take a reduced lifespan over the torture that is this disorder.

Thank you very much for sharing. I agree with your judgement regarding the side effects - and it's not like antidepressants, benzos etc are that much kinder to the body.

a "potent" physical painkiller .

Does anyone know if the word potent here is meant to be scientific or emotional? It feels emotional, the dictionary definition is "having great power, influence, or effect." which seems weird to jump out the gate with such a subjective word for an over the counter painkiller.

I was once taking out trash in the middle of the night and I've overheard neighbor's conversation: "What's the strongest thing you have here for headache and if you say Tylenol I'm gonna kill you!"

It means "effective at regular doses".

https://ascpt.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/cpt196...

Of course, an issue with acetaminophen is that if you take more than the regular dose you will die of liver failure.

I wonder if people with naturally high pain tolerance would also have reduced positive empathy?

Psych study with n=114. Given the reproducibility crisis in psychology, I'll wait for the replication.

Sure, do that. But also:

> The power analysis used a power criterion of (1 − β) = 0.80, which indicated that a mean cell size of n = 54 was sufficient to replicate significant effects of acetaminophen.

The question is not whether n=114 is "large enough" because that question, by itself, does not make sense. The question is whether n=114 is "large enough for the observed effect." Given that the p-values for the "personal pleasure" and "empathetic feelings" measures are under 0.001, the answer is "yes," potential methodological issues notwithstanding.

Disagree from experience. I find it far more likely that they considered how to skew the p-values low enough to where they become significant. “Personal pleasure” & “Empathetic feelings” do NOT sound like terms which correlate to reproducibility to me.

> “Personal pleasure” & “Empathetic feelings” do NOT sound like terms which correlate to reproducibility to me.

All studies that use terms like that have a section that explains how they are measuring it, how other studies have used the same measure and how that measure itself is tested for reproducibility and accuracy.

doesn't necessarily mean they are ACTUALLY measuring anything real. just sayin'

So without training in the field, having read about the specific example or anything else, you can say the entire study is trash?

Pretty sure caution was what was advised with no opinion one way or the other. Being extra cautious about preliminary psych findings is only sensible. It might be considered batshit crazy to do anything else given the issues we've found out about in that field. Does it reproduce? Is the right question to ask.

I'd think of it more like such studies being potential stepping stones towards the establishment of scientific facts, rather than establishing those facts alone. But it will take more work and by separate groups before anyone can have faith that these findings are meaningful - especially given the background of the reproducibility crisis.

All undergrads from a single university also. Just based on the social development of people as they go through undergrad, I'd guess that the variance in behavioural change before and after treatment is fairly high whether they're treated or not.

Just like a lot of pharma papers need a `... in mice` appended to their titles, a lot of psych papers need `... in undergrads` appended to theirs.

I don't think you should sneer at a triple-digit sample size that's justified with a power analysis based on their previous work.

I agree that you'd want to see replications before making any major decisions--these effects are often finnicky--but this seems to me like a reasonable-sized step forward.

They also had a prior justification for running this experiment based on known effects of Tylenol on the brain.

Seems like every time now, when I read a medical study, especially psychiatry-related, I'm shocked that it could even be published. I have no training in the field, so nobody would take me seriously and I even doubt myself, but the study designs just seem so poor

I tend to agree. While I think the sample size is fine, the way perceived positivity and perceived pleasure were measured seems pretty subjective in a way I find hard to generalize.

The paper does seem awfully suggestive, though. Worthy of more exploration for sure.

Scientist: Hey, that's odd ...

HN reader: I'll wait for the replication.

There's been a few over the years.

[1] 2016: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5015806/

[2] 2015: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/095679761557036...

[3] 2012: http://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/broken-hea...

That’s really fascinating. I take tons of the stuff. Should I worry?

Anecdotally, I've noticed some stuff in people close to me.

Read more while using ibuprofen, probably?

Is it a pharmacologically relevant acetyl donor btw?

This explains why some people are so stupid it hurts.

Always fun to read about how doctors recently learn about things that everyone else already knew and have coined the term "common sense" for.

"MDMA can help treat depression!"

You don't say...

Empathy must be stored in the liver which Tylenol also destroys.

Just remember, don't take Tylenol if you are in pain, as you can die from liver poisoning quite quickly. "Engstrom suffered an accident in the lab when a monitor fell on his foot. He took too much Tylenol which caused liver toxicity, and died on December 1, 2020"[0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Engstrom

"too much", if you take small amounts not too often, it's fine

I don't see how you make a leap from "he took too much Tylenol" to "don't take Tylenol".

Anything will kill you in a large enough dose. Drinking water will.

Possibly the important missed part here: the effective dose for paracetamol is alarmingly close to the dangerous dose.

Dosage rules allow for 4g/day, 5g/day can cause liver damage. It's also common to find paracetamol in multiple products - so you can take some painkillers, then not realise that the lemsip you're taking for the sniffles also has paracetamol and now you've put your liver at risk.

So perhaps acetaminophen (Tylenol) is responsible for the increasing political divide in the USA and in the world? People literally care less about each other because their empathy is being blunted. How long does the effect last? Days at least if I remember previous reports correctly. There are a LOT of people using acetaminophen often. If the effect lasted a week would just one pill a week make you a less caring person? This seems like it could be a really big deal.

If you're worried about mass emotional issues from medication, statins are one to look at.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200108-the-medications-...

Steroids cause problems with rage also. Still more people probably take acetaminophen than both steroids and statins combined. Some people probably take all three. Rage is a somewhat different manifestation than lack of empathy also.

Acetaminophen is best avoided in my opinion. Long term liver damage is a major issue, particularly in conjunction with alcohol. There's also some evidence it's linked to cancer, and why take the risk? Ibuprofen (Advil) is probably much preferable in most cases, though definitely not for long-term chronic pain.

Long-term chronic pain is one condition where opiates actually make sense, although studies demonstrate that using cannabis + opiates allows the opiate dosage to be kept below the addiction threshold while providing equivalent relief.

> There's also some evidence it's linked to cancer

Isn’t everything? I would love to see a site that was more about the relative risks of cancer. Or even better, that queries us for our behaviours and then suggests where to spend our efforts to improve our quality of life, based on well supported research.

WARNING: Reading this comment is known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm.

The moral of the story is this: Stay out of California. everything causes cancer there.

plane_with_red_dots.jpeg

We all have a risk of cancer per hour, so there is definitely a direct scientifically sound relationship between time spent reading your comment and the risk of cancer. It wouldn’t surprise me to find cancer risks associated with using specific devices (to read your comment). I presume there could be less likely psychological cause and effect: for example perhaps your comment causes anxiety and sleep deprivation with cancer as a side effect.

Acetaminophen doesn't cause long-term liver damage, it causes acute damage. The liver is very good at recovering from things as long as you don't poison it all at once.

It's actually ibuprofen that has the long-term risks, it will hurt your kidneys and stomach lining.

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