The Food and Drug Administration has assembled more than 35 experts to discuss ways to prevent overdose with acetaminophen – the pain-relieving, fever-reducing ingredient in Tylenol and dozens of other prescription and over-the-counter medications.Please FDA!!! Save us from acetaminophen!!
What a joke. When the FDA starts screwing with stuff it's bound to be retarded. Just look at how they expertly handled that whole NyQuil/Pseudo Ephedrine/Meth lab crisis.
No more meth labs!!! Yaaaaay!! Wait, whuuut?
So. What kind of likely solutions are these 35 experts considering?
The agency today asked its experts to consider a range of options: adding a "black box" warning label to the products, lowering the drug dosage in some products, or pulling certain types of medications off the market.Umm, common sense tells me that if you ban the most widely available and used over-the-counter pain relief drug that you're going to have a much greater quantity of pissed off and hurting people flooding ERs across the country. Or, instead of farmer Earl eating two more Advil a day than .gov thinks he needs to stop his migraines, he may just decide to eat a magnum instead. Well, at least his liver will be safe.
And just what do you think will happen when the dose of this wonderful drug is reduced? I can guarantee you that folks are going to eat however many pills it takes to get relief. So instead of taking four of the "leading brand" or three of the "wonder brand that's so much better than the 'leading brand'" people will eat handfuls of the stuff until their noggin stops throbbing. Way to save the world there, geniuses.
Hundreds of millions of Americans use acetaminophen, and these guys want to take it away because a tiny amount of people take too much. Meanwhile, millions of Americans take too many McDonald's cheeseburgers, and the risks from that are massively higher than anything that we have in our medicine cabinet.
Stop trying to meddle in everything!
2 comments:
I don't necessarily disagree with you here, but there is one aspect of this that needs to be considered:
Most people don't understand the risks involved in overdosing on acetaminophen.
If it were simply a matter of them taking too many Tylenol without reading the warnings on the bottle, that's on them.
What many people don't realize, though, is that the main ingredient in many prescription pain killers is acetaminophen (vicodin, percoset, lortab, etc, etc etc.). In fact, the maximum dosages of many of those prescription drugs is to avoid overdosing on the acetaminophen moreso than the relatively small amounts of narcotics they contain.
The patients may be already taking the maximum dose of acetaminophen in their prescription drugs and not even be aware of it, then they take over the counter Tylenol on top of that and OD without even realizing the problem.
My wife's been taking prescription pain meds for her back for years and I can say from experience that, in my humble opinion, most doctors and pharmacists simply don't properly emphasize the risks involved.
I agree that it is everyone's individual responsibility to do the research when taking any type of medication and I agree that any action taken by the FDA will probably be ineffectual, but this is a problem that people need to be made aware of.
I agree with you there. The article did mention the dissedents line about pretty much the same thing: that combining both over the counter stuff with prescribed stuff is way more cause for concern.
The question then is how to make the general public aware? I hold no hope in the FDA saving the day, but I'm sure that the non-prescription drug companies would be pretty wise to take the initiative and carry the ball on this one.
Post a Comment