Ep 120 Acetaminophen/Paracetamol: Pain. Killer.

This Podcast Will Kill You

Exactly Right and iHeartPodcasts

Health & Fitness, Science

4.8 • 17.7K Ratings

🗓️ 18 July 2023

⏱️ 92 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It’s safe to assume that the vast majority of you have a bottle or blister pack of acetaminophen/paracetamol/Tylenol/Panadol in your home medicine cabinet, and an even vaster majority of you have taken the medicine at some point in your life. After all, acetaminophen/paracetamol is one of the most, if not the most, widely used medications worldwide. Despite its near ubiquity, many unanswered questions remain. How does it actually work? Should safe dosage guidelines be revisited? Why on earth does it have multiple names? And finally, who was responsible for the Tylenol murders in 1982? In this jam-packed episode, we do our best to make sense of the mysteries surrounding this drug, weaving our way from the pharmaceutical nitty gritty of acetaminophen/paracetamol to the bizarre story of its discovery, from the horrific crimes that shocked a nation and revolutionized consumer safety standards to the ongoing discussions of whether we’re under- or overestimating how safe this medication actually is.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is exactly right.
0:06.0	Many put their hope in Dr. Serhat.
0:09.0	His company was worth half a billion dollars.
0:11.0	His research promised groundbreaking treatments for
0:14.3	HIV and cancer, but the brilliant doctor was hiding a secret. You can listen to
0:20.0	Dr Death, bad magic, exclusively an ad free by subscribing to Wendry Plus in the Wendry app.
0:26.8	On that September day, the postal worker picked his daughter up, as he often did, from
0:31.3	preschool at Our Lady of the Wayside in the Chicago suburb of Arlington Heights, Illinois.
0:37.0	They stopped at a nearby grocery store on the way home.
0:40.0	Kassia always loved running errands with her dad.
0:43.0	She wanted to go everywhere he did.
0:45.5	She remembers walking with him down the aisles of Jewel Osco that day.
0:49.6	He picked out a bouquet of gladiolis for her mother.
0:52.3	Cassia paused to point out a travel-sized bottle of mouthwash.
0:56.1	She loved how it fit in her hand so easily.
0:59.4	That's when her dad picked up the bottle of extra strength Tylenol. They headed home together. She didn't know then
1:06.4	it would be the last time. Oh, Oh, that's awful.
1:55.0	It is, it is.
1:58.0	So that is from a CNN article titled,
2:02.0	Transformed by Tragedy by Catherine E.
2:04.8	Schoychett published September 24th, 2022 and that is about the Tylenol
2:10.1	murders which we will chat about later in the episode. It is horrible. Yeah. Yeah.
	...

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