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.
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.
My daughter’s dog that is a climber got on a shelf and knocked a basket off that had a large bottle of Tylenol in it. She chewed the bottle up.
I got home and saw some pills and a demolished bottle on the ground. Vet tech friend said to induce vomiting with hydrogen peroxide.
Didn’t have any of that, but I did have some minty mouthwash with peroxide and no xylitol in it. Dog willingly drank it, puked with foam, drank a bit more, puked more foam, then I dug through the mess.
No pills or any sign of the color on the pills. She’s still kicking.
induce vomiting with hydrogen peroxide.
Didn’t have any of that
how are you alive? H2O2 is like the basic necessity of every first aid kit. when you get a cut or scrape at home do you just like, ignore it?
do you even have bandaids or triple antibiotic ointment?
As far as I understand it, you shouldn’t put peroxide on most, or maybe even any, wounds. It indiscriminately kills good and bad bacteria as well as your body’s cells. So it can make the wound take much longer to heal.
Similar, but I think different, with iodine. You shouldn’t use it in most cases.
The recommendation is to use warm soapy water to rinse/clean the wound really good. That’s all.
If the wound is deep enough or gnarly enough that this doesn’t seem reasonable? Well, peroxide wasn’t gonna help you anyway, go to the doctor.
I’m happy to be wrong here, to be corrected. But this is how I understand it.
Also I do keep peroxide in my cupboard, as well as rubbing alcohol. Their uses just aren’t for wounds.
Peroxide is actually a pretty terrible wound cleanser. Does as much damage to the healing tissue as to any bacteria, which is why you seldom see it used in the hospital. Honestly you are better off with lots of clean warm water and mild soap. If you really want to get wild, find some true antibacterial soap with chlorhexidine (hibiclens is the big brand name in the US) and wash the wound with that. Just don’t use it on the face bc it’s really bad for the eyes.
I guess.
I grew up on a farm. every cut, stab, or scrape was done on some rusty, shit caked, dirty metal thing or some sharp blade covered in blood. so peroxide was always used because the risk of some bacteria left behind for infection was greater than the risk of scar tissue.
my wounds heal pretty quickly, so it’s not something I’ve had to deal with.
Just because we do something for a long time doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do. In most cases, forceful irrigation with sterile saline is the best way to handle a dirty wound.
What a completely unnecessary comment
I see what you mean, but if mine was unnecessary, what does that make yours?
👍
I try and avoid painkillers whenever possible for two reasons:
- They’re crazy addictive
- They build tolerance, and when it comes time where taking them is unavoidable, I want them to work as well as possible.
Neither of these are true for acetaminophen/paracetamol though?
You can build a tolerance to both of those things, but their painkilling effectiveness is just not as strong as opiates.
Both of those are the same thing, and any chance of developing tolerance is very low.
Sorry, I was very tired - however, having taken ibuprofen for years - 2 pills will not give me the same pain relief as it did 10 years ago. I have to up it to 3, or 4. I’m not sure if this is tolerance or an increase in inflammation resulting in a need for a higher dose (hoping not).
Not that I would know, but don’t all medications build up tolerance?
Like, I was under the impression that medicinal benefits are like a side-effect to what the body might otherwise consider a foreign pathogen. Does acetaminophen not trigger any immune response?
With some exceptions for medications that use the immune system to target therapy (such as monoclonal antibodies) or drugs that target the immune system specifically, there is no immune response to most medications.
You wont build a tolerance unless you’re using it constantly. A few days for a pain a few times a year is meaningless for tolerance. As long as you RTFM, the hospital dose will always exceed your tolerance.
This doesn’t apply to opioids but I’d argue people make too big a deal about those as well, just don’t do them outside a prescription nor recreationally. You’re probably more addicted to taking a shit every now and then unless your life is already in the drain.
Just tell them you believe a billionaires earn their money, climate change is a hoax to sell books, and the solution to mass shootings is to sell more guns to more people.
You know, express the nonsensical opinions only a well deluded American is propagandized from birth to express with a straight face when they should be embarrassed at their belligerent ignorance.
American here: I know paracetamol is acetaminophen, but how much is a packet?
Depends on the country I guess.
Here, a packet is 16 tablets of 500mg (acetaminophen) or 200mg (ibuprofen).
We’re limited to 2 packets combined per purchase to reduce the chances of severe overdose.
Package dosing generally suggests 2 tablets per dose, with at least 4 hours between.
Or one tablet for children between 10 and 14.paracetamol packet
It looks like it’s a sheet of 6-8 pills
https://www.nps.org.au/news/paracetamol-ibuprofen-combinations-for-acute-pain
according to the acetaminophen i’ve got at home, dangerous dosage is >4g per day. that means that if 4 packets was 20x that, each packet would be 20g, which, if they’re normal 500mg pills, would be 40 pills per packet.
And a maximum of 2g/day if you weigh under 50kg (which not a lot of people know).
you should stick to 3g a day if you’re overall a small person, some bottles will recommend this as the max to be safe
Therapeutic dose of acetaminophen is 15 mg/kg q6h prn. That dose of 4g/day ==> 1g/dose. 1000mg/(15mg/kg) = 66.67kg == 145lb.
That’s the minimum weight for that acetaminophen dosing. If you’re under that weight, you can consider the reduced dose. If you’re over 145lb, no need to worry. And honestly, I think I’m the only one who actually doses this stuff q6h anyway. I think most people end up doing TID dosing because that allows uninterrupted sleep.
3-4000mg is toxic to the liver.
Various countries limit painkillers to small packet sizes (e.g. 20 pills here in Germany) and pharmacies only hand them out one at a time, so you can’t overdose as easily/spontaneously, either like the person in the post did due to pain, or for suicidal purposes.
It’s not perfect protection, as you can just go to multiple pharmacies to buy multiple packets, but yeah, you will have to actually go do that and will get told at the pharmacy that you shouldn’t take more, if you’re not aware.Yikes! The use of the term “packet” was initially confusing to me. Here in the States it’s not uncommon to see small packets of a single dose of over the counter medicines in gas stations and convenience stores for when you’re not at home and something comes up. The directions for extra strength Tylenol are 2 every 6hrs (1000mg dose) not exceeding 3 doses per day.
I was thinking “4 packets over 3 days, what’s the big deal?”
Worth noting as well that the OP said four packs a day for three days.
i heard some people fitness takes these so they can train excessively longer than normal. it was a news article a certain group was discussing, and they were tellinig a story of a dude doing that, that guy got addicted for sure to the pain meds, because they said he couldnt do anything without them.
they sell blister packs for tyelenol, but its usually thr brand name, which is pretty expensive.
America… I remember seeing “value packs” of Tylenol containing 300 pills… that’s their idea of freedom… to allow people the choice of slow and agonizing suicide by liver failure
Ironically, for America, this is one area where you are expected to read the label and not be an absolute idiot.
Exactly, I know I can take 2 a day and a couple days and if the pain persists I ought to seek out medical help.
We know how to follow directions, we’re just not fucking gonna
The bottle on my shelf has 350 (new, Costco brand) but I don’t take over the recommended dose for obvious reasons. Guess it expired last year now that I look heh. The smaller bottles cost more per dose so no reason not buy a larger one. This is in Canada, not the US for people curious about other countries.
That math doesn’t quite add up. Sure less per dose sounds good, but if you’re wasting half the bottle then paying a little more per dose but less total cost is still more economical.
i buy the larger ones online. better than buying the small ones. i do this for anti-histamines too, because i got allergies, i can get 1000tablets for the 1st generations easy, and cheaper pricing for the 2nd generation ones years worth. kirkland has the quality to it, im trying some off-brand(probably chinese made) doesnt seem as effective, and it was a wierd shape.
It may be less effective but you use it till the bottle is done, it’s not like milk it still works.
I wouldn’t do that because i can’t find any information on what that stuff breaks down when it ages and whether toxicity actually goes up over time
they sell larger bulk bottles, usually i buy them on amazon, in-stores are usually more expensive. i also use naproxen too.
kids were trying to robotrip on dextrotomorphan, and now they require ID to buy any cold medicine that contains it.
Well, generally you’re only supposed to take ~2 tablets at a time, so 10? 40 pills a day is 13,000mg of acetaminophen, or 20,000mg if they’re extra strength.
That’s, uh, bad. You’re recommended to take under 4000mg per day, so that’d be a bit over a packet? Makes sense to me.
For the record, mixing two painkillers without consulting a doctor is also usually a bad idea but way fucking less of a bad idea than taking 13000mg of tylenol in a day. Afaik, acetaminophen with other stuff is probably fine but napoxen, ibuprofen, and aspirin all work roughly the same way and shouldn’t be mixed.
For the record, mixing two painkillers without consulting a doctor is also usually a bad idea but way fucking less of a bad idea than taking 13000mg of tylenol in a day.
Basically, if something hurts so much that you might take enough paracetamol/acetaminophen to fuck with your liver then you yes, you should be under a doctor’s care. That said, between my wife and me, we’ve had three or four doctors over the years all be very chill with the idea of alternating Tylenol and Ibuprofen after surgery or the like. I guess they work on such different chemical pathways that they don’t have much interaction potential, and keeping under the daily dose of Tylenol in particular is incredibly important, as we’ve seen in this thread.
They act on different systems, yes, but this is more about the metabolism of each.
Non-steroidal-anti-inflamatorirs can cause damage to your stomach and kidneys.
Acetaminophen/Paracetol metabolizes in the liver a similar way alcohol does, and like alcohol has a maximum rate of clearing the toxin.
yes, you should be under a doctor’s care.
That’s not always an option, unfortunately, but it’s definitely accurate.
tyelonol works on the liver, the others like ibuprofen, naproxen,etc works by inhibiting the cox1 and 2 enzymes. of courses take 2 much of the inhibitors is very similar to aspirin, it can prevent clotting(which in itself is a therapeuthic uses for clotting disorders)
Don’t take my word for it but I think paracetamol and ibuprofen with added codeine can be taken together despite the double codeine as the amount they have is low enough that double is still safe.
Check with a pharmacist first, dosages are going to vary and I am just some guy on the internet.
I don’t think there’s a standard size, but I know they sell them in packages of 3x10 where I live. Eating 4 full packets of those in a day would put you at 15 times the upper recommended daily dosage, for what it’s worth, which is calculated slightly conservatively to not be lethal for any adults
You can also often get high-strength pills for chronic pain that are 665mg instead of the regular 500mg.
I believe I’ve seen them sold in 1g pills where I live as well.
the ones for arthiritis, is around 625mg, with caffiene. i had 500mg naproxen Rx for buristis once, it can cause stomach issues, because it turns on inflammation, so the acid levels increase and can cause things like heartburns.
Reading the meme it seems like a packet is five times the dangerous dosage.
That guys a moron. The bottles are very very clear not to take more than the recommended dosage. Its labeled all over the bottle.
I’m kind of pissed that such obvious and preventable idiocy leads to an almost immediate liver transplant.
Yes, that’s just a lucky coincidence for him, but still…
in english, french, spanish, and sometimes german.
Did you ever stop to consider that this person was in so much pain with no other alternatives that they might have done so out of desperation rather than simple ignorance?
If you’re in that much pain, you go to the hospital, you dont overdose on Tylenol. This isn’t a sympathy thing. And based on the response they gave the doctor, it was an ignorance thing.
I’ve been in this position before. Sent home from hospital twice to “take some paracetamol”. Third time I went in they pumped my stomach because of how much paracetamol I had taken, and finally gave me some actual painkillers.
When you are in debilitating pain, side-effects are not something that you particularly care about.
Side effects like death?
With the amount of pain i was in, i didn’t care. Death was 100% on the table as a viable alternative.
That sucks, I hope you are doing well
Holy shit. It’s almost like there are systemic barriers that would prevent them from having access to healthcare.
Not everyone can afford a doctor. Welcome to the reality of what people have to go through just to get through their day.
It is entirely an empathy thing, and you lack it.
Typed a whole thing put and then deleted it. Not even going to bother. You’re making inferences you just cant make from the post. I agree, there are systemic barriers to Healthcare, this isn’t that.
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.
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 100% does help actual pain when combined with opioids.
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”.
It’s good at reducing fever
PSA: stupidity is dangerous
Yeah, how long until this idiot cooks this liver too?
Honestly, getting a liver transplant in a week is the most unbelievable part of this story.
Happened to me. It was actually 6 days. Listed on a Friday, transplant was done the following Wednesday.
Wild
It really just depends on how sick you are, and where you are, at least in the US.
For liver they use something called a MELD score. Kidney they use GFR, maybe other things, not as sure on that.
Where matters because the US is broken into transplant regions and you can only receive an organ for a region where you’ve been listed.
That’s why, if you have money, you could go to a couple regions and get listed, then travel wherever the first organ is available.
In this particular case it was probably pretty important to transplant quickly, otherwise his kidneys likely would have failed.
This man’s life drastically changed because he made a really poor decision.
Here’s to hoping that I never have to find out first hand.
Just a literal Life Pro Tip for anyone still reading, sign up for organ donation. It will cost you nothing, the urban myths about hospitals harvesting the organs out of “locked in” locked in donors are total BS, but the lives you can save are very real.
Stupidity? The dude is living in constant pain from dental issues and was just trying to not suffer.
Desperation is not stupidity.
Someone didn’t get a live because it was used for this dumbass
People who make mistakes deserve to live too. Don’t be like that. We’ve all done stupid shit, he just happened to kill his liver with this one.
deleted by creator
It isn’t “natural selection” when it was caused by systemic issues preventing the man from receiving adequate dental healthcare.
It’s bizarre to me that someone can make it to adulthood without knowing that paracetamol specifically is no fucking joke.
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.
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
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”.
I mean this is just dumb. Like I’m sorry but this would happen with basically every medicine or drug. They aren’t made to be taken at higher doses than advised.
(Imagine you took 8 liters of beer per day for 3 days, you’d be half dead too.)
Moderation people…
You haven’t seen the ridiculous quantities that some alcoholics will consume
Tolerance is a different beast. But 8 liters of beer is ridiculous.
Humans drink 2-3 liters a day. Of water.
8 liters is like average for Oktoberfest visitors
It all comes back up.
Yup. Didn’t say it was good for them
Should*
Paramedic here, once brought someone in who ended up having a blood alcohol of .64. Dude got to sober up in the ICU.
On the medical board exams, you get questions talking about patients that drink pints or liters of liquor every day and you’re expected to know all the various health problems that come with alcohol use disorder.
Moderation people…
We don’t do that in Eastern Europe™
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?
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.
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.
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 not the first one to ‘kill his liver’ with paracetamol/ acetominophen (tylenol). First case I recall, the person was taking tylenol nightly with a glass of wine. Here’s some links on the current understanding of Liver injury and paracetamol:
Apparently it’s not always overdosing: Paracetamol-induced hepatotoxicity at recommended dosage (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1046/j.1365-2796.2003.01097.x)
Acetaminophen-Induced Hepatotoxicity: a Comprehensive Update (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4913076/) “…in the United States, in particular, it accounts for more than 50% of overdose-related acute liver failure and approximately 20% of the liver transplant cases.”
Risk Factors for Hepatotoxicity Due to Paracetamol Overdose in Adults (https://www.mdpi.com/1648-9144/57/8/752) “In the univariable analysis, significant hepatotoxicity risk factors were male gender, alcohol abuse, an ingested paracetamol dose, and a timespan from ingestion to hospital admission. The later one was the only significant risk factor in the multivariable model (adjusted odds ratio 1.08; 95% CI: 1.03–1.12).”
Paracetamol (acetaminophen) overdose and hepatotoxicity: mechanism, treatment, prevention measures, and estimates of burden of disease (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37436926/) “Where data were available, we estimate that paracetamol is involved in 6% of poisonings, 56% of severe acute liver injury and acute liver failure, and 7% of drug-induced liver injury.”
Understanding paracetamol-induced liver failure (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00134-014-3293-9)
