Comment by klodolph | Hacker News Reader

Comment by klodolph | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Not accidental, but very tragic. It's the #1 cause for calls to poison control, and accounts for 26,000 hospitalizations every year, and 500 deaths. Dying from an acetaminophen overdose is not a good way to go out, you spend a couple days in the hospital suffering as your organs fail and your loved ones watch.

Other OTC drugs are much safer. I don't allow acetaminophen in the house. Pseoudoephedrine? Yes.

Acetaminophen also should not be taken as a hangover cure, due to interactions with alcohol (alcohol and acetaminophen compete for the same metabolic pathways in the liver, and this exacerbates the toxic effects of acetaminophen). The problem is that someone who's drinking and has a hangover is probably going to reach for one of the two most common OTC pain relievers in their medicine cabinet, and not consider that one of those two pain relievers should not be combined with alcohol.

500 deaths (many intentional attempts at suicide) in a country of 350M where arguably every household has acetaminophen present is incredibly low.

By comparison, the number of accidental firearm deaths is around 430 per year, and somewhere around 40% of US households have a firearm. So we can say that having acetaminophen in the house is roughly as dangerous as having a firearm in the house. Obviously this is not some kind of direct comparison between firearms and acetaminophen.

I included the statistic in the first place because I thought it didn’t make sense to cherry pick the scariest statistics. I’m not fearmongering here, just trying to illustrate that acetaminophen should be treated with more care than we currently do. I think we could be making better health policy decisions about which medications are OTC and which aren’t, although this topic is incredibly complicated and doesn’t just come down to simple facts like toxicity.

I wouldn’t use accidental gun deaths when acetaminophen is often used in suicides. There are 25,000 of those with guns each year in the US.

But yes, acetaminophen is a drug, can be dangerous and shouldn’t be treated as benign.

Do you have numbers for how often acetaminophen are used in suicides?

Yes, agree with everything factual you said. I guess the problem isn't the compound itself but rather not enough information regarding its use.

I personally keep tylenol in the house because it's probably the best non-narcotic non-NSAID pain medicine.

We use it all the time in patients who are elderly with decreased renal function because they don't do well with opiates or NSAIDs (ibuprofen)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com