I've always had an (unreasonable?) dislike of Paracetamol/Tylenol ever since I found out it was the #1 cause of acute liver failure in the US. Liver failure is scary.
Results: "Suicidal deaths from paracetamol and salicylates were reduced by 22% (95% confidence interval 11% to 32%) in the year after the change in legislation on 16 September 1998, and this reduction persisted in the next two years. Liver unit admissions and liver transplants for paracetamol induced hepatotoxicity were reduced by around 30% in the four years after the legislation. Numbers of paracetamol and salicylate tablets in non-fatal overdoses were reduced in the three years after the legislation. Large overdoses were reduced by 20% (9% to 29%) for paracetamol and by 39% (14% to 57%) for salicylates in the second and third years after the legislation. Ibuprofen overdoses increased after the legislation, but with little or no effect on deaths."[1]
So if you're going to off yourself you'd have to stock pile or roam around shops picking up.
There is a not insignificant number of suicides where people just say fck it I'll just kill myself but they don't want to go out to any real bother to do it i.e. they don't pre-plan it it's just spur of the moment. A bottle of kill yo self pills is pretty easy. Cupboard, swallow, drink down some water, die. But having to go out and buy a bunch over a few days or like drive around in your car just buying as many as you can. Like you'd have to look it up to check you're going to buy enough.
Back when that law came in when they didn't reduce the total amount you could buy at one time so if you went in and bought like 10 packs at the supermarket then the person at the till would be like ok this person's going to kill themselves so again that would require a bit of balls from the would be kill yo selfer.
I think you can buy a bottle of like 100 x 500mg for like $20 in the USA. That's like over 2 weeks swigging at the max amount. Like you don't need that many, 3-4 days is enough shouldn't be taking that much of the stuff.
Roughly:
- Paracetamol overdose can cause severe liver damage and may be fatal.
- Ibuprofen in high doses can lead to kidney injury and stomach bleeding.
- Aspirin overdose may result in salicylate poisoning, causing ringing in the ears, confusion, and metabolic acidosis.
There is a rich and varied multidimensional field of danger, from aspects like the safety-margin between regular/dangerous dose levels, the chronology of how it can spike or accumulate, whether there's feedback in advance of damage, etc.
Yeah, I can poison myself drinking clean water, but it's hard.
Together they have higher pain killung effects than each alone, and the side effects are reduced as they affect different body parts. And the vitamin C reduces the damage to the stomach lining.
Meanwhile, taking ibuprofen can negate the effect aspirin has when taken against cardiovascular diseases. Not a huge problem if you're just taking it as a painkiller, but not everyone can combine the two. That's another potential reason to take paracetamol over some NSAIDs, though you should obviously consult a doctor if you're taking prescription medicine of any kind.
That is wild.
If true, it would have to be genetic? I mean, unless it is chronic dehydration from their sense of humor?
Oxygen toxicity is not a risk for most people. You either are a scuba diver regularly working at depths beyond what most do or are taking supplemental oxygen while under the care of a doctor. You are not at risk of oxygen toxicity reaching into your bathroom medicine cabinet.
Other drugs like theophylline have ceased to be prescribed for a similar reason alternatives were available, but due to drug marketing, acetaminophen is touted as the "safe" pain reliever.
Paracetamol's patents have expired long ago and there's not much profit to be made out of it (nowadays it's mostly not being made in the West, but imported from China, unlike profitable medicine).
The reason why it's still used it's that it's much better than the alternatives, despite the risks (it's only risky if you don't respect the doses by the way).
Since it’s a mild and really common painkiller, sometimes seen as not dangerous, someone uneducated about it who is really suffering could easily take 3 or 4 times the dose.
Unlike a lot of drugs, you are not going to have a lot of immediate side effects if you overdose on paracetamol. You’ll just horribly die some days after,
And the solution is simple: educate people about that.
And it's not something hard to do, just have pharmacists say “respect the dose as it will kill you if you don't” every time they sell things and it'll work.
It's funny that in a country where you can win massive sums of money on stupid trials a drug like paracetamol is sold without supervision.
She would take a dose for a headache, ten minutes later she'd forgotten so she'd take another dose, ten minutes later, she had forgotten, take another dose, rinse and repeat until it's time for a trip to the hospital.
Maybe it wasn't ten minutes between, probably fewer given how much she'd ended up taking. This happened thirty or so years ago.
This is why Ibuprofen is perhaps the better default painkiller.
- different packages of the same medication have different doses per pill. So you might read one package that says to take two pills, then later you buy a different package of the same painkiller that says one pill, but you're lazy, and don't read the label for this, and assume it is the same as last time, so you end up doubling the dose.
- For ibuprofen, the label often says if one dose isn't sufficient, then you can take another pill (with a maximum number in 24 hours). People may assume this is the case for Tylenol as well, but I don't think it is.
- people may read the size of the dose, but skip over the warning about the maximum you can take in a 24 hour period.
- The directions are in small hard to read text, which makes all of the above points worse.
Not that any of those are a good excuse not to read the label, but, well, people make bad decisions all the time.
Total culture shock for me, as in Europe the default for children is rectal ingestion (which is probably a culture shock as well for Americans). Any how, with pills it is much easier to avoid overdose.
We ended up crushing and diluting tablets in milk, which he would drink (you waste a lot of milk to hit the right factor).
We had blood test done (on the doctor's recommendation), and luckily there is no sign of any damage, but prescription errors do happen (even if they are rare) and it's much easier with liquids (you probably wouldn't give 8 pills to a baby, but 8ml doesn't seem so bad).
There's no “as in Europe”, every European country is different. In France the default is also liquid form, but the pipette is graduated is kilograms of baby weight, which limit the errors you can make (you know your kid doesn't weight 15kg when his weight is around 8).
I think the mistakes also come when the child spits out part of the liquid, and parents give another dose.
Never met a non autistic child who would spit or drool out calpol. I'd take the stuff myself as an adult it tastes brilliant.
> Total culture shock for me, as in Europe the default for children is rectal ingestion (which is probably a culture shock as well for Americans)
Huh are you talking about new born babies or something? I've been to a few different EU countries and you can buy liquid stuff for kids in the chemists. (Spain, france, germany, italy) source me as a child getting the stuff when I was sick abroad and the local doc sold my parents basically some off brand calpol.
Otherwise, it's much easier to get them to take a pill than drink a liquid.