Science Attacks The Mystery Of Tylenol

nm1m writes "For decades, millions of physicians have advised their patients to take acetaminophen - the drug behind "aspirin-free" pain relievers like Tylenol - without understanding how or why the popular medicine works. Now, a professor at Brigham Young University has discovered what could be the enzyme the drug attacks to relieve pain."

Comments

That's a bit disconcerting

[Cecil]

That they didn't really know what this drug was doing... mind you I guess that's what most drugs do.

It just kind of underlines how little we know about the human body and the chemicals that operate it.

Re:How Tylenol Works?

[Locke!Erasmus]

Those are some interesting ideas.

Regarding morphine in particular, I have read in a couple of places that the more pain a patient is in, the more of morphine and other pain relievers they can tolerate. For example, a patient in late stages of cancer can tolerate doses of morphine that would kill a healthy person.

I apologize but I do not recall the sources for this information.

Tylenol kills brown snakes

[ChadN]

A recent issue of "Science News" magazine (within the past two months), had an article about an experiment where Guam's brown snakes were fed rats stuffed with about 6 acetaminophen (the active ingredient in Tylenol) tablets. All the snakes that ate the rats later died, even the ones that regurgitated them fairly quickly after swallowing them.

Since the brown snake is an introduced pest, and is highly dangerous to the bird population, this discovery is seen as a way to poison the snakes, with hopefully minor side effects for other animals.

And if I were a lawyer, I'd stick to Ibuprofin (ba-dum-bum)