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This.
I don't understand why it had to be hard-coupled with Autism. Tylenol is kind of ... bad? ... for people. As far as I'm aware, other general pain relievers like naproxem sodium and ibuprofen are roughly as therapeutically effective without the massive risk to your liver / accidental OD.
So, I agree with some other posters that this is "your brain on memetic reasoning ... and probably ChatGPT."
For non-pregnant people, yes. But sources not linked to the US culture war suggest NSAIDs are potentially much worse during pregnancy than Tylenol, and can cause fetal defects and maternal hemorrhage risks. US sources suggest NSAIDs increase miscarriage risk early in pregnancy too.
Learning has occurred. Thanks!
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It had to be hard-coupled with autism because RFK Jr. positioned himself as the "I'm going to solve the autism epidemic" guy, was getting raked for basically falling for Wakefield's frauds, and had to either double down and/or find something else he could point to instead.
There are still a couple pain-relief use cases for acetaminophen, though, even if it should be obsolete in general.
First: it doesn't interact with other pain relievers, so you can "double up" in cases of extremely strong pain, alternating doses of acetaminophen with a NSAID, taking both at full strength. My son had to do that recently for a broken arm; for the first few days of healing his only other sufficiently-effective option was a prescription for codeine (pre-combined with acetaminophen; not sure how much of that is "synergy" and how much is "we can deter opioid addicts by holding their livers hostage"), which he saved for when he needed to sleep.
Second, and more significantly in this context: it has been basically the only pain relief option that (assuming you're not allergic and don't overdose) is still thought to be safe during pregnancy! Even if you banned it for any other use case, there'd still be a strong argument to make it available for pregnant mothers, where the liver risks are the same but the next best alternative is "no pain relief" rather than "ibuprofen". NSAIDs increase risks of miscarriage when taken early in pregnancy, and risks of premature birth and birth defects when taken late. I've never dug into the research to see how much they increase risks, and of course typical lists of side effects never include probabilities, but these are the sort of qualitative risks that steer mothers and ob-gyns away from a drug regardless of the numbers.
Yeah, and it's not like we've all got formidable cognitive defenses to begin with.
Consider how "typical lists of side effects never include probabilities" gets treated as a normal, reasonable state of affairs - how can humanity be so innumerate that even teams of MDs can default to functional innumeracy without noticing? I like Mark Liberman's use of the Pirahã language (which has no words for numbers more specific than "some" or "many") as a metaphor, seeing their hand-wavy attitude toward numbers as a reflection of ours towards probability distributions ... but, damn it, the median first-world citizen educated enough to read his medication's fine print still isn't expected to be past the point of being hand-wavy about numbers! When it comes to questions like "how likely is it that the medicine you're about to swallow will make you sicker", we're not just simplifying "the Bayesian posterior looks like a lognormal with mean 1e-4 and standard deviation 1e-5" to "1 in ten thousand", we're effectively simplifying "1 in ten thousand" to "some"! We could translate it to Pirahã and back just fine!
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