APPARENTLY NOT: Tylenol Isn’t So Safe, But At Least It Works, Right?

I’m not a big fan of Tylenol, which becomes rather obvious if you read the first part of this two-part series. For a drug that is so widely used, it is quite easy to consume enough, accidentally or otherwise, to take enough to suffer a toxic overdose due to irreversible liver damage.

But drugs cannot be judged by safety alone. Both the good and the bad – benefits and risks – must be taken into account to get the true measure of the quality of a drug. So if Tylenol isn’t all that safe, you might expect that, at the very least, it should work well. Otherwise, why would so many people be taking it?

That’s the $64,000 question, and here’s the answer. In reality, Tylenol doesn’t work very well at all, and there is plenty of evidence to back this up, especially in systematic Cochrane Reviews – highly regarded, evidence-based reviews that carefully evaluate the quality of data in multiple studies.

I don’t keep Tylenol in the house because of its deleterious effects when combined with alcohol — and unlike Tylenol, alcohol is an effective painkiller.