It is Thursday the 13th of November 2025 in your listening to Skeptics with a K, the podcast for science, reason and critical thinking.

Skeptics with the K is produced by Skeptic Media in association with the Merseyside Skeptic Society,

a non-profit organisation for the promotion of scientific skepticism on Merseyside, around the UK and internationally. I'm your host, Mike Hall. With me today is Marsh. Hello. And Alice. Hello. For the live show that we did at QED, I briefly talked about the evidence for paracetamol. Yes, and you confirmed that I was right about everything. I was surprisingly, I was pretty on the nose as to what I felt about paracetam. I was pretty happy. I was worried going into that. Well, not going in because you hadn't told me that's what you were doing. I was worried when you started that I'd look like a tit in front of a live audience. But I think I came off all right. And in fairness, that was the intent when I started writing that story. Let's Make Marsh Look a Tit in front of a live audience. But I think I came off all right. And in fairness, that was the intent when I started writing that story was, let's make Marsh look a tit in front of the live audience. But actually, you pulled that off, mate. You pulled that off. Yeah, the evidence for paracetamol is actually pretty poor. It does show efficacy for pain relief. It does show efficacy for fever management. It has a better safety profile than the alternatives. But I think it's surprising how poor the evidence based for it management. It has a better safety profile than the alternatives.

But I think it's surprising how poor the evidence base for it actually is.

Even though it is effective and it does work,

it's just the evidence isn't there that matches its reputation as a painkiller.

But one of the things that I'd rather elided over during the show

was the new claims by the Trump

administration that paracetamol is the cause of autism, of which I was very dismissive, as you can

imagine, because, you know, fuck those folks. And I think it's a claim that we can largely just dismiss

on the papers, as it were, by looking at the historical record. So paracetamol was first discovered in the late 19th century, but didn't really enter widespread use until the 1950s when it was rediscovered and introduced into the US market commercially as Tylenol. And then the following year or a couple of years later, introduced in the UK market as Panadol. Turns out Panadol was the first paracetamol in the UK. Panadol's still around, I think. You still got Panadols. No one bothers. No. It's not worth the money these days. So paracetamol first became available commercially in the 1950s, but autism was first identified in the 40s before the introduction of paracetamol.

The word autism was around before that, before that it referred to a type of schizophrenia.

But the start of what we refer to today as autism spectrum disorder predates the commercial

use of paracetamol by about a decade.

So just on the face of it, we can say, well, autism is not simply caused by paracetamol because it existed before paracetamol. At least it's not a singular cause if there is a relation. Yeah. Which we're not saying that there is, but if there were. We're not saying that there is, no. But if there were, it's not as simple as paracetamol, it causes autism. It cannot be that simple. It might be a contributing factor.

I don't think it is.

But it can't be that simple, right?

And that is even ignoring cases going back into history

where people are clearly described as having autistic traits,

even though the diagnosis didn't exist yet at the time.

So Isaac Newton, for example,

is described as having difficulty with

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