Yes you can overdose on Tylenol, but considering how widespread it’s use is, there are only 2800 cases of liver failure in the US each year and a fraction of those are due to Tylenol. That out hundreds of millions of users.
So people should be careful and follow the label, but to suggest it’s too toxic to be on the market is silly. You could say the same thing about GI bleeds with NSAIDS and the harm done. Should we just have not OTC options for pain at all?
And it looks like this blog post cherry picked a few studies. And pain studies are notoriously hard to do. Placebo effects are very high for pain.
> Should we just have not OTC options for pain at all?
We should not pretend they're harmless.
And we should probably make opioids more available (albeit still regulated): If the pain is bad enough that you'd risk your liver, you need something stronger than Tylenol!
And we should educate people better about how to use these things safely and sparingly. Some people use them like candy, which isn't safe and isn't effective. (There seems to be some evidence, admittedly of poor quality, that using pain relievers more frequently leads to less effectiveness. This is just one reason why treatment of chronic pain is so difficult.)
So people should be careful and follow the label, but to suggest it’s too toxic to be on the market is silly. You could say the same thing about GI bleeds with NSAIDS and the harm done. Should we just have not OTC options for pain at all?
And it looks like this blog post cherry picked a few studies. And pain studies are notoriously hard to do. Placebo effects are very high for pain.