In the US, the FDA tried to limit how strong the individual capsules can be (325mg), but you can still buy it in 500mg strength. There are mandatory warnings on the label, but you can buy it in 500-tablet (at 325 or 500) bottles over the counter. It took almost 60 years before the FDA did anything, so a lot of people grew up thinking it was harmless.
PSA: stupidity is dangerous
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.
Stupidity? The dude is living in constant pain from dental issues and was just trying to not suffer.
Desperation is not stupidity.
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.
That’s just natural selection doing its thing
It isn’t “natural selection” when it was caused by systemic issues preventing the man from receiving adequate dental healthcare.
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.
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.
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
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.
325mg APAP x4 will not kill you short term.
Yeah I’m p sure the daily maximum on the package is 4k
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Seriously, read the insert. Indications, warnings, dosage, expiration date. Every single time.
… Is the expiration date that important ? I always thought the drug would just lose effectiveness but not really become dangerous
Yes, some drugs break down into other compounds that can be toxic after their expiration date.
then why to the others have it?
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?
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.
Nothing. However it adds a layer of difficulty to acquiring more. That, for a lot of people, is enough.
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
Well that is a permanent solution to some kinds of pain
- don’t be an idiot and 2) read the leaflet
Sounds like a messaging problem, despite the idiocy (or rather, because idiocy is the default). Like, I’m not silly enough to eat 4 boxes of paracetamol a day, but I’ve also read maybe 3 medication leaflets in my entire life, and I’ve been on literally dozens of antidepressants and antianxiety meds. I basically scan over the leaflet to see what sort of dick problems I can expect 😆
It’s like the Terms of Service of an iTunes update. No cunt is reading that shit. People just know “i make click i get music”, and “i swallow lump of chalk i feel better”.
The leaflets aren’t even written for laypeople to really understand them. Besides being in a 1pt font, they’re written in something bordering on legalese but with medical terms. “Contraindications”?? The fuck am I, Beatrice Pharmacist the inventor of pharmacism? I don’t blame people for getting 2 sentences in and giving up.
That said, the dosage is on the front of the box, and that should be enough for even the most imbecilic person. But if you lose the box and just have loose blister packs lying around for a year, you might go off the rails a little when the tooth pain kicks in.
It’s also the case that something as “basic” as paracetamol being such a widespread and easy-to-buy medication causes a strange lack of respect for its potential danger. Like “pop a pill when you have a headache” is so second nature to us. It becomes a non-threatening intervention that only becomes less threatening the older you get, because it’s just… there. So you don’t even feel the need to check the leaflet for side effects and such, because it’s ‘part of the furniture’ of our lives. This is the messaging problem I alluded to. You really gotta think about the dumbest person alive, and then aim for someone twice as dumb as that.
They should have just printed him a Darwin award on a piece of single ply toilet paper and sent him on his way.
Darwin award implies that he doesn’t already have any children
That can be assured with a few post birth abortions.
I mean… Yeah. There are instructions on the packet. They aren’t supposed to be eaten like candy.
even vitamin gummies can be overdosed to a dangerous degree. Hell, even too much water can kill you, it’s difficult to achieve but it can flush out all the nutrients from your body. Always make sure to know how much of anything is safe to put in your body
Yup. I had a buddy give himself Vitamin A poisoning from eating gummy multivitamins like they were candy.
not vitamin A but i personally can’t have the vitamin C megadoses available in pharmacies. Apprently my body needs less vitamin C than most people, normally it’s very hard to have too much of it, but when i take a megadose like 1000mg (daily recommended is ~100mg) i get incredibly painful stomach cramps, whilst everyone around me is just fine
That’s why paracetamol should be sold in the pharmacy by a pharmacist who asks you for what you are using that stuff and warns you about side effects.
i really don’t want to live in a society where every move of a literate person is questioned because there’s illiterate people roaming around.
There’s clear dosage information in that leaflet inside every single paracetamol box. If you’re emptying a box a day (let alone 4 boxes a day) and don’t bother checking if that’s safe then this is entirely on you
In a family of five, how often would I have to go to the pharmacy under that rule? Keep in mind that menstrual pain is a thing. Or would that just be the cheat code to get a dangerous dose?
How would the different online pharmacies know how often I told that story? Or does your proposal just mean “increased shipping cost”?
Don’t think that’s practical at all.
I don’t know what that would change? You go to the pharmacy, say you have a family of five and menstrual pain? Nobody said anything about limiting the amount of drugs to buy.
Oh sorry maybe I misunderstood. Yes, paracetmol and other painkillers should only be sold in pharmacies. This is the case in Germany but you can buy essentially as much as you want if you tell them it’s for multiple people.
Can you just buy them in a supermarket in the US?
edit: nvm, you’re from DE as well. Again, sorry for misreading.
No? People should be allowed to decide that shit for themselves. It’s not anyone’s job to hold your fucking hand when you can just read the label.
As shown above, they don’t read the label. Ironically, you didn’t even read the screenshot that’s the cause of all of this - which disproves your point entirely.
Yeah, problem is people cannot be relied upon to read the label. People are idiots. So it’s a good suggestion to put a gatekeeper (pharmacist) in front of the dangerous stuff to walk people through the dangers verbally.
/thread
Yeah that’s what US Americans call “freedom”, but in other places that’s not what it means. Where do you draw the line? Should people be allowed to buy opiods from the supermarket?
Yes, Tylenol #3 is otc in many countries
In all seriousness though providing drug users a route to buying drugs that were safely and reliably manufactured would both significantly lower harm and significantly limit the impact of cartels (see how they switched to controlling avocado trades as they are now losing the ultra lucrative marijuana market). Further, by not forcing users to go underground for their trade you could not connect them to resources for rehabilitation much more easily and earlier in the process of addiction
So yes you should unironically be able to buy safely manufactured heroin and cocaine and fentanyl in a store. Maybe not the grocery store, but a store
That’s guys a moron. The bottles are very very clear not to take more than the recommended dosage. Its labeled all over the bottle.
in english, french, spanish, and sometimes german.
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…
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 have the doctor, it was an ignorance thing.
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.
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.
Let’s say the maximum recommended dose is the “dangerous dose.” That’s 4 grams. 20x4=80 grams of paracetamol/acetaminophen. That’s like 160 goddamn pills
The maximum recommended dose is generally much below the LD50 of a drug.
It also tends to be the maximum recommended dose for short term dosage for painkillers.
His issue was taking this for a long period.
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.
Gonna need something stronger, noted.
What’s a better pill to kill yourself with?
Just better, a rusty hammer
Difficult to eat such a mighty meal
I could definitely think of a couple, but if you kill yourself, you’re letting trump win.
I’m not American
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.
