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The Tylenol Controversy

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Clarissa

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I have no idea why people are suddenly going nuts on social media over the suggestion that they shouldn’t take Tylenol during pregnancy. Isn’t it widely known that medications should be avoided during pregnancy unless specifically indicated by the OB-GYN? What’s the big shocking thing here? There are many things we avoid during pregnancy. Smoking, alcohol, raw fish. Everything that is not spinach if you are severely gestationally diabetic.

Of all of the discomforts of pregnancy, truly avoiding Tylenol should be the least noticeable. As long as you get your baby in the end, who cares? Why are people fixating on something so unimportant?

17 responses to “The Tylenol Controversy”

  1. ed Avatar
    ed

    I’m honestly very puzzled about the whole autism thing. It seems like is a US only thing, like I never see anybody else around the world taking this thing so seriously. Is it really just so bad just in the USA? Americans just seems so obsessed with diagnosis every little thing that deviates in the slightest.

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    1. methylethyl Avatar
      methylethyl

      The US has had rising rates, across the board, of all neurodevelopmental disorders, plus asthma, allergies, childhood kidney disorders, eczema, T2 diabetes, T1 diabetes… and a handful of other things, since the 1990s. Some of these are squishy diagnoses, might’ve been ignored 50 years ago, etc. This is emphatically NOT true for stuff like T1 and epilepsy. The fact that those are going up in tandem with the rest supports the assertion that this is not just a problem of neurotic parents seeking to diagnose their kids with something, anything, that will make them special.

      People like to focus on autism in this picture, because it’s good for a heated argument, furious controversy, overwrought emotions, and then everybody’s energy is dissipated on that unsolvable conundrum, and nobody looks any further. You can be supercilious and say “Oh, but that’s just overdiagnosis: the criteria have changed over time” and feel like you know more than everybody else. Meanwhile, the rates of severe autism (the unequivocal, nonverbal, head-bashing, banshee wailing kind), have been rising along with rates of the more “high functioning” stuff that might’ve just been tagged ‘learning disabled’ or ‘eccentric’ in some other era. Whatever. There are perverse incentives attached like ticks to that beast on every exposed patch of skin. As soon as you start giving school systems money for each kid with xyz problem (and autism is one), school systems start issuing as many referrals as possible. It’s an administrative problem, that is running cover for a whole host of other medical problems. Also, there’s almost certainly some connection with drugs, and that means drug PR companies are actively involved in making sure every discussion of the problem gets re-routed through the “It’s just overdiagnosis” and making sure everybody’s so angry about it they never get to looking at any other disorders.

      If you want to see what people are talking about, zoom that lens out about fifty miles, and look at the bigger picture: over that same timespan, rates of kids having seizures have gone up (epilepsy is hugely comorbid with severe autism). More kids have asthma now. Kids born in the last ten years have higher rates of facial tics. That’s not a “diagnosis has changed” problem. The symptoms and diagnosis for those things are clear and unchanging. Nobody rushes to the doc saying “Doc! Diagnose my kid with facial tics so I can get into the special therapy program!” There is no funding, no therapy, no special program, for facial tics. They just are. They make you look funny, kids at school make fun of you, and then everybody you know gets used to them and stops noticing. It’s a good indicator for overall rates of neuro disorders. And it’s up.

      There’s something very wrong, it’s getting worse over time, it seems to be worse in the US than in other countries, the pattern is environmental rather than genetic (but all our research funding for twenty years has gone down the vortex of genetic research, as that would absolve chemical/drug companies), and there’s a huge propaganda effort devoted to making sure no reasonable dispassionate public discussion of it ever happens.

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      1. Stringer Bell Avatar
        Stringer Bell

        There are incentives.

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        1. methylethyl Avatar
          methylethyl

          Yes. Funding. Mentioned that. It’s a problem. I’m sorry I rambled too long and it was hard to extract that. Please try detaching yourself from preprogrammed talking points and looking at what I wrote.

          “Overdiagnosis and perverse incentives” happens to be a CYA talking point for the chemical/pharmaceutical complex, and they have paid trolls all over the internet who have to interject that every time anybody starts talking seriously about causes, about the broader problem, etc. It’s not in their interest to have a serious discussion: best get everybody screaming at each other ASAP.

          Perverse incentives in diagnosis are a problem. That doesn’t negate the ACTUAL problem of rising rates of nearly every possible non-communicable disease, in children. There are zero perverse incentives for diagnosing a kid with epilepsy. You do that because the kid is having seizures.

          Try looking past autism and its programmed talking points (from every possible angle: yes I know there are grifters in the antivax scene too). Look at all the other disorders on the rise in children. Many of them not subject to weird incentives and poor definitions like autism. The problem is real, large, and growing.

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      2. Clarissa Avatar
        Clarissa

        People get really upset when anybody tries to mention any of this. There’s a big social taboo on bringing it up. It’s quite obvious that severe autism is up. But we have to kind of just accept it and not ask why. Which is weird because there’s clearly something going on here.

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        1. methylethyl Avatar
          methylethyl

          I think the taboo is artificial.

          Remember those awful mommy-forum wars over breastfeeding? Quite a lot of that, back in 2010ish and the years around it, was fueled by just a handful of “internet doctor” sort of personalities… who later turned out to be actually literally working for formula companies. Yeah, there are real people who get weirdly religious about formula vs breastfeeding but everybody I know IRL is much more chill about the whole thing. We all know at least a few ladies who tried really hard, but had IGT or traumatic Csections or whatever and just couldn’t. Not a huge deal. But take that discussion online, and all of a sudden these militant crazy people just crawl out from under every rock and turn the whole thing into a screaming frenzy and get the topic banned. Not all of those people are real: some of them are getting paid to do that, to ensure that there are zero sane, public fora where the topic can be discussed reasonably.

          There is NO WAY the same thing isn’t going on with the autism discussion. It’s just now they have botnets, and the paid troll strategies have evolved. It’s too easy to do a bit of research and out “Dr. Whatsername” as an employee of Nestle Corp. who has never seen an actual patient in her whole career. They don’t do so much of that anymore. The cool kids strategy that seems biggest now, in addition to bots and probably AI, is to simply see who the most-read people are on the topic, and start offering them money to say certain things.

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  2. ed Avatar
    ed

    Totally unrelated, but Trump is really taking the whole madman theory to another level:
    https://pbs.twimg.com/media/G1jdROyXcAEjrPW?format=jpg&name=900×900

    It’s like every week he changes course. I give him credit for that, he’s keeping everybody on their toes.

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      It’s more words. These words, those words. I’m only interested in action.

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  3. Avatar
    Anonymous

    Why are people fixating on something so unimportant?

    Because they are told to.

    They are told to because the corollary of in-utero infant brain-development to the toddler brain-bloom. Using Tylenol to mask the symptoms of a bad reaction to a vaccine, whether due to the drug itself, or production failures (so-called hot lots), or merely individual susceptibility puts parents and pediatricians in an unpleasant place. It’s unthinkable.

    And because multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical industries, the academic-government-medical complex, and a network of sacred cows and professional reputations are at risk if anyone looks too closely at bad-reactions children experience to any or all of the childhood vaccines.

    Even if it’s “just because Tylenol made them worse.”

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    1. Avatar
      Anonymous

      Is this Chatgpt, or translating from a non-English language?

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      1. Clarissa Avatar
        Clarissa

        It’s a Spanish source but the videos are English.

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  4. bluebird of bitterness Avatar
    bluebird of bitterness

    A lot of us older women are ticked off because NO ONE told us this when we were pregnant. The doctors all told us Tylenol was perfectly safe, it couldn’t possibly harm the baby, etc. I had double pneumonia when I was pregnant with baby #3 and my doctor wanted me to take antibiotics, which I was very leery of (I hate drugs)… but he insisted that they were perfectly safe, they wouldn’t harm the baby, the risks of not taking them were much worse, etc. I was young and ignorant and very sick, so took the blasted things — which only made me sicker and certainly did the baby no good. She has had autoimmune issues throughout her life.

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    1. methylethyl Avatar
      methylethyl

      IKR? I first heard about the tylenol-autism connection over ten years ago. The studies have been around at least that long. I remember reading about it after my eldest was born, and calculating how many times I’d taken it while pregnant (twice. One dose each time.).

      I have heard that even the very best research takes at least ten years to make it into med-school curricula, and then decades to filter out to doctors already in practice– it’s rare for those to stay current on the research, beyond the drug sales parties disguised as “free seminars.”

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    2. Avatar
      Anonymous

      yes, I had pneumonia with my first child too and also took antibiotics. She has horrible eczema and unpredictable allergies. I suspect possible MCAS but not diagnosed yet. I will never know if I made the right choice but I might choose differently if I were in that situation again.

      Before I knew I was pregnant with my second I took antibiotics for Lyme. I had a positive pregnancy test two weeks later and he is my healthiest child. I think it was so early on it made little difference. With my first I was in the end of my second/start of my third trimester.

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  5. ed Avatar
    ed

    Micro plastics are something I’ve been thinking about. It’s a relatively new thing, it’s absolutely everywhere now, and increasing being tied to auto immune diseases, cancer, infertility, neurodegenerative diseases, and a host of others. Apparently autism as well. Don’t know, maybe to an extent modern life is just less healthy.

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  6. ShadowsCollide Avatar
    ShadowsCollide

    As someone with a younger brother who has actual autism, who has worked with children with autism and has adult friends with autism, I agree that autism rates are higher and more common. I’ve worked with both low-functioning cases where the kids bang their heads and don’t talk to kids who just didn’t make eye contact and were obsessed with cartoons, plus middling cases.

    My younger brother was actually the first autistic person I ever met, but growing up there were always several kids in each class who were kind of weird but since they got decent grades they were left alone. They might be diagnosed as autistic today, I might have been diagnosed myself since I was a quiet kid who was socially awkward and read loads and got obsessed with bands or Viking history or TV shows, back then I was just a weirdo, like a lot of smart kids. I think that the borderline cases are from parents who have a weird kid and want a diagnosis instead of accepting they have a weird kid, too many moms are terrified of having a weird kid since that may look bad on their part

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    1. methylethyl Avatar
      methylethyl

      My mom had a decades-long career as a SPED teacher, starting in the 70s. She did not get her first autistic student until the late 90s. Autism existed then, of course, but the school system sent profoundly disabled kids to a whole separate school with an intensive program. There were always a few of them. Mom’s speciality was behavior problems not learning disabilities (she got the kids who couldn’t function in a regular classroom, because their presence was too disruptive to the other kids) so not dyslexic or mildly retarded kids, that was the LD SPED class.

      So: late 90s, got her first autistic kid. That first one might’ve been an artifact of the new “Aspergers” or PDDNOS diagnoses, probably would’ve been left in a regular classroom previously. She got two of them the next year, and bunches more over the years that followed, who absolutely belonged in her classroom, because they could not function in regular classrooms, alongside normal kids… but also weren’t the sort of profoundly impaired that would get them sent to the other school. Verbal,didn’t need helmets, but… also far higher maintenance and needed a lot more watching than her typical students (who tended toward individual problem behaviors like aggression, or outbursts). The autistic kids (and note these were ‘mildly’ autistic, but not what would be classified as ‘high functioning’) needed intervention most of the time.

      By the time she retired, these students were a normal part of the SPED program. She says (and I believe her, because she was there), that this was a new phenomenon. Not autism specifically– those always went to the other school– and even she thought there was some overdiagnosis going on, but not in her kids. The overdiagnosis was in the mainstreamed (regular classrooms) whose parents had pushed for the dx because it got them an IEP, extra time on tests, drugs, and artificially inflated grades. There were actual problems there, but these kids would not have been diagnosed with anything in 1978. Where she saw the huge increase of “this just wasn’t a thing before” was in the middle ground: the ones who ended up in her classroom. Verbal but stilted. Very disruptive repetitive behaviors. Had to be worked with constantly just to get them to a level where anybody else in the classroom could learn anything. At the same time, the intensive program at the other school had to be expanded hugely, so those numbers were going up, as well. The population in our county also went up during that time, so I suppose you could blame that, but… it didn’t triple or quadruple, like the SPED numbers did.

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