Microblog Memes

paracetamol packet

It looks like it's a sheet of 6-8 pills

https://www.nps.org.au/news/paracetamol-ibuprofen-combinations-for-acute-pain

according to the acetaminophen i've got at home, dangerous dosage is >4g per day. that means that if 4 packets was 20x that, each packet would be 20g, which, if they're normal 500mg pills, would be 40 pills per packet.

Various countries limit painkillers to small packet sizes (e.g. 20 pills here in Germany) and pharmacies only hand them out one at a time, so you can't overdose as easily/spontaneously, either like the person in the post did due to pain, or for suicidal purposes.
It's not perfect protection, as you can just go to multiple pharmacies to buy multiple packets, but yeah, you will have to actually go do that and will get told at the pharmacy that you shouldn't take more, if you're not aware.

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.

The fact that the drug companies lied about the addictiveness of their product so doctors were handing them out like candy didn't help.

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.

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.

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...

Off the shelf in the UK, they're sold in packs of either 8 or 16 tablets, and shops are legally only allowed to sell you two packs at once. Pharmacies can of course supply larger quantities with a prescription.

The recommended dose is one or two 500mg tablets every 4 hours with a maximum of 8 tablets per day.

Yeah, I think this is what's causing the confusion here. We don't measure pills in "packets" in the US, so I think some people are taking "4 packets" to mean that they only took four pills and of course that's absurd.

You haven't seen the ridiculous quantities that some alcoholics will consume

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.