Before they (rightly) switched Vicodin to the lower tylenol content version we have now I would routinely see older ladies prescribed 1-2 pills 4-6 hours a day of the ES strength which has 750mg a pill for MONTHS at a time. Obviously the boss would lay down the law and tell them not to exceed 6-8 pills a day (depending on who my boss was that day) but that never stops the doctors writing for it every damn time.

When the switch happened and we could no longer order the old strengths it took the usual suspects 4-5 weeks of being called by us and who knows what other pharmacies before they started to write for valid strengths. How could pain management doctors not know this stuff? We still get the odd script for it but that's from family doctors.

It really annoys me because it's needless risk for minimal benefit and I'm willing to bet the culprit is not a lack of care for the wellbeing of the patient but sheer ignorance. Sadly this ignorance is shared with the public at large because they have been wrongly educated as to what a safe level of tylenol is.

I'm not some silver in the nose whackadoo or ginger up the ass mentalist; but go ahead and call me a troll all you like. I will rail against giant tobacco companies and drugs that needlessly endanger the public at large regardless.

The extremely thorough and well researched ProPublica article on acetaminophen is fucking jaw dropping. How very thin the margins are on safe/fatal doses, the slimy history of Tylenol parent McNeil, the 30 years of lag on proper warnings from the FDA. It just keeps going.

The worst part is acetaminophen is in EVERYTHING, Tylenol, Sudafed, Thereaflu, Nyquil, Vicks... its not hard to see how a few hundred people a year accidentally fatality overdose on the most heavily marketed "safe" medication there is.

http://www.propublica.org/article/tylenol-mcneil-fda-use-only- as-directed

And if you'd rather listen than read, This American Life did a whole episode on the ProPublica report as well

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/505/use -only-as-directed

I highly recommend getting this story one way or the other, the history is so far beyond what you can imagine.

Eh, I've always used aspirin when something hurts. It works better than Tylenol (at least for me), and the fact that too much will give me an upset stomach prevents me from taking it unless I need it.

Dispose of it properly. Don't throw it away or flush it down the toilet.

The hospital where I work switched from Vicoden & Lorcets to Norco a while back. Sadly, 1,000mg of acetaminophen iv aka Ofirmev is now all the rage.

Nothing good will come of this.

Should be common sense not to take that much aceto, even druggies I knew back in the day would avoid the combination pills.

I'm not saying it's a positive choice, but back in college I got kind of freaked out about my liver.. it was the early days of things like WebMD (symptoms: You might have #1 A COMMON COLD #2 CANCER/STROKE/AIDS) and had a massive panic attack that I attributed to binge drinking that I figured was an actual heart attack or something. I was also taking a bunch of Tylenol at the time; I wasn't used to the cold winters, and as soon as it got warm you'd wake up thinking it was snowing and realize it was FUCKING POLLEN.

Anyway, after that I stopped taking any drug that can have an interaction with alcohol that effects the liver, including when I got my Wisdom teeth removed (I got really high and drunk and gave the vicodin to my friends.) I'm sure I still do things that aren't good for me, but I've been store-drug-free for 12 years!

It's about fucking time they cracked down on this. There was a good This American Life show about this just a few months ago. Part of the show talked about how they did a report over 30 years ago detailing these liver effects, but despite thousands and thousands of deaths EVERY YEAR the FDA never put a liver damage warning on the bottles. Really makes me angry.

Bob Ross videos work just as well.