Not “even paracetamol”. ESPECIALLY paracetamol.
Tylenol/acetaminophen/paracetamol is both weak ass painkiller and really dangerous because the overdose line is low. Here they put it in synthetic opioid drugs, it doesn’t help with pain but does make them more dangerous.
It’s good at reducing fever
oh yea it isnt as good as other otc nsaids, like ibuprofen and naproxen, or aspirin. oh and that fake pseudoephedrine mimic(phenyleprine) for cogestion, they already said it has no effect whatsoever. its mostly the 1st generation antihistamines doing all the work for your sinuses when you have the cold anyways.
isnt as good as other otc nsaids, like ibuprofen and naproxen, or aspirin
The do different things. It all depends on the type of “pain”.
Opioids are fir suffering whereas acetaminophen is for pain signals. A combination of ibuprofen and acetaminophen have been demonstrated to be the most effective pain killer we currently have.
Pain and suffering are different things.
It might not get you high, but it absolutely does help actual pain when combined with opioids.
I think what’s extra dangerous about Tylenol is that it doesnt feel like it’s doing anything. When it works, some minor pain goes away, or maybe your fever goes down. But there’s no side effects that you really feel, so I bet people get a false sense of security with it. Like, oh it isn’t giving me opioid euphoria, or knocking me out. And you can just buy as much as you want, no restrictions. It must be perfectly safe.
Tylenol: that’s a brand of paracetamol for non US people.
I think paracetamol/acetaminophen being barely perceptible is why I’ll always feel safer with opioids, THC, or even NMDA antagonists like ketamine in a pinch–as someone who is extremely informed with this particular subject.
I blame autism.
If a compound is barely effective, causes liver damage (particularly with other compounds metabolised in the liver), and has a bunch of negative interactions… sorry, it’s garbage. I genuinely would rather go darknet than CVS or Walgreens, and test for purity. Besides, dealers are generally way cooler than corpos anyway.
I hope that nobody takes it as an invitation, though–I said I’m informed. If you’re not informed, don’t.
I will add this; Paracetamol? Almost placebo. Phenylephrine? Actually placebo. Guaifenesin? Placebo if taken orally. Practically the entire counter is placebo, except for the antihistamines (first/second generation like diphenhydramine/Benadryl and cetirizine/Zyrtec) and nasal cleaners and such. With that in mind, I would encourage people to research absolutely everything they ingest, regardless of how safe the product may seem.
They are certainly not 100% safe.
This should go without saying (probably preaching to a choir), but legal ≠ safe, indeed. Still waiting on that thesaurus to prove me wrong. It’s been 3 years.
Stay smart, and stay safe.
There is a brand mixing acetylsalicylic acid and koffein which works wonders as a quick relief for migraine while my standard naproxen usually requires a few hours of darkness to start working, so I can’t agree that all over the counter meds are garbage. I can’t refute your placebo claims since the effect cant be measured by myself
Shoot, I forgot aspirin! It actually is a genuinely effective painkiller. Mixed with caffeine, and you pretty much have Excedrin. My mother has very bad migraines, and it is true that this formula just works, for some reason.
Excedrin is a good product. If you have a migraine, I’d suggest taking it. I will add that my mother seems addicted to it, though–taking it on the daily multiple times, even if a headache is mild.
Be careful!
Nothing is perfectly safe. You can kill yourself with water poisoning, and that’s pumped directly into your house.
how the fuck did they find a donor so fast???
I got a heart transplant about 18 hours after being added to the list.
serious question, but how?
Got lucky I suppose, as “lucky” as waiting or someone to die so you can live can be. They did warn me it could be weeks before I hear anything.
edit- I was also pretty high priority (or whatever it might be referred to as) being in my early 30’s when it happened, not a drug user, and generally take good care of myself.
for science, can i ask about your income level? just want to be happy for once today, if it really was luck.
Unemployed. Had some extremely helpful people get me on state assistance while I was being treated.
i’m glad it worked out for you
Depends, who’s your liver guy?
Fake story
Couldn’t they have given the liver to someone who was less of an idiot?
Ex alcoholic and “cirrhosis survivor” here. (I hate that latter term.)
I’m stunned that this situation went down how it did.
I had the full jaundice package when I finally went into the hospital and agreed to detox. I was told I would have to be booze-free for a minimum of six months to be considered for a transplant of any kind; both my liver and kidneys were in concerning shape.
They told me the timeframe for actually being considered was more like two years; there’s basically a board of trustees for each state, they review every case requesting an organ transplant and decide who gets what. (It’s literally a death panel, haha.)
No matter how good I was/am, I would still be at the very lowest priority. They’d have to have available livers as far as the eye can see for me to have a realistic chance. There is no actual chance I would ever get a donor liver, and I don’t want one.
I was dumb. I did it completely to myself. It’s not as simple as “you could’ve quit anytime you wanted,” trying to do that with alcohol is extraordinarily dangerous, BUT I did indeed do this to myself. It would be galactic levels of unethical and immoral for me to be trying to take a donor liver away from ANYONE.
I have since recovered way past the expectations of any medical personnel who worked on me during that time. July 1 will be two years alcohol-free for me.
My point in all of this is that I’m honestly having trouble believing this guy got this transplant at all, let alone so fast.
Organs don’t keep… If they got the donor it probably meant there wasn’t anybody else queued up.
It’s bizarre to me that someone can make it to adulthood without knowing that paracetamol specifically is no fucking joke.
People look up resources on them and see that the recommended max dose of ibuprofen is lower than paracetamol per day in weight of the active ingredient and stop reading.
They don’t get to the part about how the effect per weight isn’t the same. Or how damaging paracetamol can be for the liver if you take it regularly or go over the recommend limit. Heavy drinkers especially don’t take into account the extra stress on their liver, which is a contributor to the 400-500 deaths it causes every year in the US alone.
Meanwhile ibuprofen makes you feel sick and want to vomit once you start to go over the recommended limit. And if you reach that stage, you basically just stay hydrated to keep your kidneys going and wait for it to pass. Since it usually takes another 2-3 times as much to for the severe effects to occur.
To quote Scrubs:
Dr. Cox: Did you just page me to ask me how much ibuprofen to give Mrs. Lenzner here?
Sunny: Well, I was worried it would exacerbate the patient’s
Dr. Cox: It’s ibuprofen! Here’s what you do. When she wakes up, get her to open her mouth nice and wide, then get some of those ibuprofen pills in your hands and throw them at her. Whatever sticks in there, that’s the correct dosage.
And in the pilot episode, it was J.D. and regular strength Tylenol.
Acetaminophen (paracetamol) is definitely tough on the liver. I remember during EMT classes (well, I kinda remember, was 20 years ago) having one of the paramedics in the class talking about how it was worse on the liver than heroin. Now yes, heroin obviously has other downsides, but it’s just crazy to think about. I have always limited my intake of it, never take it if I’ve been drinking, that sort of thing. The issue is that it’s not exactly common knowledge. I know plenty of people who would drink and take some Tylenol at bedtime to kill the hangover. Not a good habit.
It’s not common knowledge?
Not in the US.
On an informal survey of several hundred men aged 18 to 60 at or below the income cutoff for recieving free medical insurance from the state they were living in, less than 10% knew Tylenol was bad for your liver at all and just over 25% knew that long term ibuprofen use was bad for kidneys.
The number goes up when income does, but considering the number of people working for minimum wage over here…
We have a culture of ADVERTISING medication here, every possible attempt at minimizing public knowledge of medical side effects is made at every legal turn because fear cuts profits.
Edit – I should add that I’ve met multiple educated people who heard that the Brits had some super dangerous liver killing over the counter painkiller that they just LET people have who were glad we didn’t allow that kind of nonsense here.
Very few people know what paracetamol is and would be surprised to learn it’s another name for Tylenol.
It’s common knowledge, in the same way that “you shouldn’t text and drive” is common knowledge. People know it, and ignore it
I would say most people are like this. Knowing it’s super dangerous in high doses is the minority because it’s sold OTC and everyone knows and trusts it.
not everyone studies drugs
there is a stark difference between “studies drugs” and “does the bare minimum research on the pharmaceuticals one puts into their body”
It is absolutely imperative that you understand the safety profile of ANY substance entering your body.
I was about to make a joke about understanding the safety profile of the air you breathe, and then I remembered I work near various chemicals… Mfs have mixed clorox and lysol at my workplace before. Safety is no joke
not following safety is frequently funny, almost no safety procedures are funny, not following safety wins.
I was taught this as an actual child because it’s so important and paracetamol is so common. It’s nothing to do with “studying drugs”.
Is this real? Who gets a liver donor in 4 days?
The liver damage is very believable but a liver transplant after 4 days is absurd.
The only way it happened is if people who need a liver but not because of alcohol-related damage are pushed to the top of the list. The alcoholics would basically be last in line. Some might say that’s discriminatory, but it’s perfectly normal to triage patients and provide care to the ones with more immediate needs, or the ones most likely to survive. Doctors have to make judgement calls.
Or even need a liver transplant in this situation.
The liver heals itself so removing the paracetamol that caused the failure would allow the liver to begin that healing process.
Four packs of Paracetamol will fuck up your liver beyond repair. Downing a blisterpack in one go can already kill you, let alone four.
It wasn’t even 4 packs, it was at least 12 packs, probably a bit more. Also how many are in a pack?
No organ magically heals itself, you’re not Wolverine. Liver damage is permanent, any dosage over 4 grams of paracetamol per 24 hours (typically four doses of two 500mg tablets) can cause liver damage. Let the damage accumulate, and you’ll go into liver failure. If the liver fails, you’ll have to hope you’re lucky enough to get a donor, or you’ll be counting down hours left in your life. Take good care of your body and be healthy, your older self will thank you.
No organ magically heals itself, you’re not Wolverine.
Why would it be magic? My skin heals itself. Bones heal themselves…
No organ magically heals itself, you’re not Wolverine
There are at least 2 organs that heal. First is your skin, if you consider that an organ. Wounds heal and often leave scars as a lasting reminder of the damage that was there.
The other organ is the liver, the scar tissue that occurs in the liver after healing is called cirrhosis.
Time is the factor you’re missing.
When the liver is damaged it stops doing it’s function. Removing the paracetamol doesn’t remove the damage, so the the liver is still not functioning. It would take a long time to recover the liver function after you’ve stopped taking the paracetamol. You can only live days without a functioning liver.
Hence, you’re dead.
You know what else is stupid? Pain management in the US. I get that you need to be careful about addiction, but the idea that people should have to suffer pain because we’re having a pain medication “reefer madness” spasm is idiocy.
The guy just kept taking them until his teeth stopped hurting. Why is the alternative that he just has to put up with being in pain?
The fact that the drug companies lied about the addictiveness of their product so doctors were handing them out like candy didn’t help.
Yeah, it was rampant here in Jersey, and we’re definitely still feeling the effects. Things that didn’t need opiates got opiates. And guess what? Lotta people all of a sudden need them for life. And it wasn’t just Oh, here’s your script. Doctors were knowingly abusing it for profit. So like with most things in life, some people ruin it for everyone else.
Yes it is. I have had, over my 40 years as migraineuse (they started in my teens) 5 intractable migraines. Meaning less than once every 5 years I get one that lasts days, I cannot eat or drink, just puke. I used to be able to go to my doctor and get shot up with opiates and Phenergan, so much of it, they would do one dose, come back later, another, another, another, until finally I would say “it still hurts but I don’t care” and go home nodding like a junkie, sleep and wake up with no headache, and, importantly, NO desire for more drugs.
Now the opiates are not allowed because they didn’t work. But nothing works on the status migraine. Now they give you a cold cocktail IV of some sort of Advil and nausea medicine and it doesn’t work either, and costs $2,000 because it can only be done in the emergency room not the doctor office.
It’s adding insult to injury. There has to be some way to make these available for acute situations at least.
I worked with a middle-aged women once who had a variety of health problems - she wheeled an oxygen tank around the office with her - who told me she got a migraine during puberty and had had it ever since.
My wife has gotten migraine with aura since her teens, but thankfully only once every couple of months, and they tapered off to a couple times a year when she hit around 40. Her mom was opposed to allopathic medicine, so my wife never got anything stronger than sugar pills. They were bad; she’d last in bed crying and screaming, if she wasn’t at the toilet dry-heaving.
Sometime after we married, she started trying all of the various migraine meds, like Imitrex; nothing worked reliably after the first couple of times, and now she keeps Vicodin in her purse. She uses, maybe, 20mg once every couple of months, and it mostly does like you say: she says it still hurts some, but she doesn’t care.
I will hurt the person who tries to take that from her.
I will offer hope. Menopause, regrettably did not help, they got less intense (which I didn’t know was a thing, when the doctor used to ask I would get confused could only say worse than childbirth, they were all 11 on a scale of 10, but after menopause they were more like 6/10) and more frequent.
But
Menopause plus MHT (low dose of estrogen and progesterone, same amount every day) has knocked out nearly all of them.
So if she is menopausal and still getting them, she might want to try the MHT - it’s only meant to manage symptoms (migraine could be one) not get your blood level up to any target.
And yeah I remember how it was before I could afford any medical care, I often thought death would be relief. Migraine is the worst pain I have experienced, and I have had natural births, lost loved ones, broken bones - nothing has come close to a bad migraine. And all were bad until menopause.
Our GP is recommending that. She’s (my wife) is not quite there, and isn’t eager to force menopause. She still gets her visitor.
I’ll pass that along, though; it’ll only be a few more years, at most.
It was an unexpected benefit, birth control pills made mine so much worse I was reluctant to try the MHT, but it has made a remarkable difference, I feel really good, and not dreading a migraine is probably a big part of that.
Imitrex by injection did work for mine about 95% of the time, I am really sorry it didn’t work for your wife. It’s incredible when it works, no drugged feeling just awful feeling rush then easing of pain until no headache.
We have never had good pain management here. Claiming babies can’t feel pain, black people hace higher pain tolerance, etc etc. then we swung into really permissive use with oxycodone for a while.
Pain isn’t an unhealthy condition & it won’t kill you. Medicine isn’t supposed to eliminate pain entirely especially if it conflicts with medical treatment or promotes unhealthy dependence on painkillers.
Pain is definitely not a vital sign & those pain face scales & the like are propaganda brought to you by pharmaceutical lobbyists instead of hard medical science. Americans have uncritically played into some strange ideas without asking where they came from.
You don’t suffer chronic pain, do you?
We can’t cure migraines. We can’t cure cancer. We can’t cure back pain. We can’t cure a lot of stuff that causes recurring pain in people, for whom pain isn’t a warning but a useless life impediment.
The body is not a perfect machine, and we don’t understand or know how to fix most of the problems with it.
You don’t suffer chronic pain, do you?
Off-topic: the topic is a toothache, which is usually curable.
There are medical guidelines for chronic pain management, and leaping to dangerous, addictive substances aren’t that. There’s pain catastrophizing to watch out for. There are multi-disciplinary approaches recommended before turning to prescriptions.
Despite not suffering more pain than other nationalities, Americans had been taking disproportionately more pain pills than the rest of the world. There is something wrong with the mentality that treats medicine as an exercise of pain satisfaction rather than pain management & imagines that patients need to live pain-free despite the dangers.
During the opioid crisis, articles like this had belabored that point repeatedly & explained where the industry went wrong.
Yeah, I’ve dealt with massive tooth pain before. Given a choice between going through a week of that pain, and maybe killing myself with pills, I’ll take my chances with the pills.
He’s lucky it was just his liver. People who overdose or try to commit suicide with it are not in for a good time or quick death and after it’s absorbed into your body it will cause a systemic shutdown of several organs like the kidneys and pancreas. Not just the liver, and there’s absolutely no way to counteract this after that first 36 hours. You will die (you aren’t getting all of the organs replaced) and it will take days before you succumb. No antidote or life support or anything can be done for you.
You’ll feel fine the first day but may have some vomiting. By day 3 the jaundice and stomach pain sets in as the liver is first to show signs of the organs failure and it’s no longer possible to counteract the drug. By the fourth day your organs start shutting down and you’ll have much more pain and vomiting. All that can be done is get your affairs in order because you’ll be dead and in pain while you wait around to die and regret your suicide.
I say suicide because it’s almost always intentional. It usually takes 40 325mg pills to cause this, although the liver damage can be caused with 20+ pills in an adult, generally. If you think you’ve possibly overdosed get to the hospital quick and tell them what you’ve taken so they can start you on Acytylcystine. If you “feel fine” after the first day or so and think you’re all good you may be wrong and when day Tyree rolls around and your feeling bad or jaundiced your liver is already wrecked and can’t be fixed.
What’s a better pill to kill yourself with?
Cyanide
That’s extremely painful
Paracetamol overdoses are still worse though. Organ failure is long, painful and normally filled with regret.
Suicide by pills is a complete lottery unless you know the specific effects when taken in massive quantities. Most people don’t and assume overdoses will just be extensions of regular doses. “It’s a pain killer so I won’t feel anything” is really dumb logic.
Just better, a rusty hammer
Difficult to eat such a mighty meal
Propofol I think?
I could definitely think of a couple, but if you kill yourself, you’re letting trump win.
I’m not American
Oh don’t be so hard on yourself. Wanting to die doesn’t make you un-american.
Gonna need something stronger, noted.
Sounds like American healthcare to me.
You either cope, and probably cause irreparable hard to yourself, or you go to the clinic or ER and get labeled a drug seeker.
Americans don’t call it paracematol, they call it acetaminophen or just tylenol. This is from the UK.
Oh, shit! Guy OD’d on acetaminophen? Yeah, that is scary. My wife had a friend that attempted a self KO with Tylenol for some reason. What a horrible way to go. She is so lucky she didn’t need a transplant.
In LATAM the 3 are well known names for the same active medicines
fun fact, when you mix sinus medicines your blood can test positive for methamphetamine.
I know this because I am now on a list of meth addicts at every networked hospital after an er visit while treating a sinus infection.
they took four blood tests and “confirmed” I was high on meth and refused to treat why I was there in the first place because to them, I was high as shit. even though I was literally directing people around blood on the floor and calling for housekeeping to come clean up the blood on the floor because the nurse refused to do her fucking job.
I asked to be removed from the list as well as have the false test results removed from my history and was told that’s impossible.
doesn’t technology make things so much better? Now the best pain meds I’ll ever get at a hospital will be extra strength Tylenol. you know, that shit I have at home they charge me $400 a pill for.
Pseudoephedrine is the main ingredient in meth, that’s why they changed all the OTC sinus stuff to phenylephrine years ago, and why the OTC stuff doesn’t work worth a damn anymore.
My brother in Christ, the paracetamol box LITERALLY says to never go more than 4 grams (4000 mg) in a 24hs period on any mg pills presentation
And as far as I see, that’s a general rule with everything. Even those caramels for sore throat or reflux pills, where you’d need to eat thousands in a day to overdose, say the same
Don’t fuck with medicine dudes
You’re assuming he can read.
It’s people like this who make other people think any amount of painkillers is bad, and seem to get a sense of superiority about them for never taking any.
Even a little acetaminophen makes my liver feel funny the next day. Ibuprofen actually works for pain relief for me (migraines mostly) but it can cause stomach ulcers. Painkillers are definitely not something you can just use without thinking, and daily use especially can fuck your body up, ibuprofen is also hard on your kidneys.
Take the minimum effective dose as infrequently as possible.
did you ever check your liver? that doesnt sound normal. with a small dose.
nsaids can cause bleeding and ulcers if itsa high dose. its because it inhibits cox 1 and 2, for clotting, and it works on your stomach by turning off inflammation, so your stomach can combat the acid with more mucus and cell turnover(inflammation increases cell turnover), thats why h pylori is a thing.
It’s why in the UK shops won’t sell more than 2 packets at a time. It’s statistically reduced the amount of people killing themselves with them (intentionally or by mistake).
It’s OTC right? What’s stopping people from visiting multiple pharmacies?
Inconvenience
It is stupid scary how a lot of what prevents people from doing the most outlandish shit is just being designed in a way that is mildly inconvenient.
It’s also utterly depressing that the reason things don’t improve is usually just because making those improvements would be mildly inconvenient in the meantime.
Studying wildlife conservation, and a lot of the studying on presenting findings to the government for policy decisions or to Garner public support is how to make it sound convincing. The key to it is to make it more convenient that whatever they are currently used to doing. That’s it. If you can do that, you’re almost guaranteed to get your policies passed.
This is the reason why medication that can be used for self harm (including death) comes in blister packages and not in bottles.
Its inconvenient, and takes enough time to give your brain some more time to think
Nothing. However it adds a layer of difficulty to acquiring more. That, for a lot of people, is enough.
Technically nothing but even the fact that it is limited is a deterrent for buying too much, plus people are too lazy to visit multiple pharmacies.
How big is a packet?
Off the shelf in the UK, they’re sold in packs of either 8 or 16 tablets, and shops are legally only allowed to sell you two packs at once. Pharmacies can of course supply larger quantities with a prescription.
The recommended dose is one or two 500mg tablets every 4 hours with a maximum of 8 tablets per day.
ok that helps. Over here you can get a bottle of 100 or more at one.
Yeah, I think this is what’s causing the confusion here. We don’t measure pills in “packets” in the US, so I think some people are taking “4 packets” to mean that they only took four pills and of course that’s absurd.
I think in UK paracetamol is sold over the counter in 28 x 500mg tablets most commonly. Larger packs or higher strengths are prescription only I think.
So 1 pack should last 3.5 days at the max adult dose of 8 per 24h - but I think it’d recommend seeing your doctor if you get into a second pack and you’re still using that maximum dosage.
Generally shops will limit sales to 2 packs, but it’s easy to shop around so that’s no limit.
I don’t know where you’d get packets of 28x500mg.
oops my memory failed.
It’d mostly be in 16s in the supermarket. So each pack is probably 2 days at the max dose.
Asking the real questions.
Kinda surprised you didn’t give some it answer
How much is a “packet”? edit: never mind, I found several conflicting answers in the other comments, no need to add even more and add to the confusion.
Too much
ITT: People who don’t know the difference between acute and chronic ODs and how a smaller amount over a long period can hurt you. 325mg APAP x4 will not kill you short term.
The problem was taking it every day over a long period.
Its still fucking stupid though.
I think the problem here is the word “packet” and what that means here exactly. Would be much more clear if they listed the amount of mg, or at the very least, how many pills are in a “packet”
I’m like 99% sure they took way more than just 4 Tylenol.
I’ve only ever seen “packets” contain two pills or capsules. 325x2x4= 2,600mg or 2.6g, well below the 8g average one time adult OD dose.
Taking less than 3g a day for <3 days is fine, although if you’re needing that much you probably should see a medical professional about something more tailored to your type of pain.
Really though way too many people in general have the idea pain killers of any type should remove all pain and in many cases, that’s not realistic without long term health complications.
Edit: lemmy did not like me using asterisks for multiplication.
Are you in the US too? Because I’ve only ever seen 2 pills in anything resembling a “packet” here as well.
However, other comments here seem to be implying that “packet” might have a different meaning in this context in Europe, with some suggesting it could be referring to an entire blister pack…
Just by the context in the OP itself, the implication is that this person took an absolute shit load of acetaminophen. Seemed to imply more than “just” 8 pills, which is still a lot but as you say, doesn’t seem like enough for an acute OD.
So I’m wondering if they have packets with more than just 2 pills over there.
325mg APAP x4 will not kill you short term.
Yeah I’m p sure the daily maximum on the package is 4k
