Acetaminophen Reduces Both Pain and Pleasure, Study Finds

An anonymous reader writes: Researchers studying the commonly used pain reliever acetaminophen found it has a previously unknown side effect: It blunts positive emotions (abstract). Acetaminophen, the main ingredient in the over-the-counter pain reliever Tylenol, has been in use for more than 70 years in the United States, but this is the first time that this side effect has been documented.

Comments

Tradeoffs

[Tablizer]

Perhaps this is why they are sold over the counter. If they didn't also deaden pleasure, they may otherwise be too addictive to be allowed over the counter. To be non-addictive, they may have to reduce pleasure to compensate for reduced pain. They could be (relatively) non-addictive because the overall affect averages out to neutral feelings so that a "pill=good" feedback cycle is not produced in the brain.

Re:Tradeoffs

[rtb61]

Yep, because feeling good via any other means than mass consumption is bad. Although the principles mass consumption are very bad psychologically and do drive a need for feel better drugs. Mass consumption is also very bad for the environment, so what exactly are we doing by favouring it of simpler less environmentally taxing feel good methods, especially when the need for the feel good methods is driven by the feel bad nature of mass consumption ie you are not consuming enough so the engines of mass consumption purposefully sets out to make you feel bad in you failure to consume, which you can only alleviate via consuming more and more and more. The feedback cycle on mass consumption seems to be far worse all around, individually and environmentally.

Re:Tradeoffs

[TheCarp]

Funny, as a pot smoker myself, who would love to see the terrible jobs program known as our drug war ended, I actually think its MORE important to legalize the harder drugs, even though they have a lot less users.

Fact is, drug laws have not been found even marginally effective at their intended purpose. Addiction rates do NOT go down as a result of them. In fact, about the only things drug laws have accomplished are filling prisons and creating law enforcement jobs. They also did a pretty good job making sure any violent street gangs that formed had easy access to lots of money, making them more lucrative and more able to expand and war with eachother.

There is ample evidence that drug addiction is not the cause of criminality either. However, criminality is the entirely predictable result of raising the price of people's addictions beyond their ability to pay and causing them to make irrational decisions like choosing between drugs and food or criminal acts and starvation.

Do you blame the drug addict who knows a little chemistry and knows he can feed his own addiction and maybe make some money cooking meth? Or do you blame the policy makers who created the black market for meth in the first place? No (or exceedingly few, there is always one of anything) homes burned before drug laws came to town. Now? Now half the people in burn units are there as a result of meth cooking..... and.,... the laws haven't even reduced drug use!

Whats worst, if you go back, its pretty clear all this hubub started as a jobs program after alcohol prohibition. It was the very people like Harry Anslinger who were facing possible loss of funding and their jobs with it, if new drug laws were not created..... they lied to congress like it was their job. Seriously, google good old Harry, you will see.

On the other hand, we have the swiss heroin study that looked at EXACTLY these issues. What did they do? Very simply....they provided heroin to junkies at what they believed would be an open market rate without prohibition and a safe place to use their drug. The result? well, they continued to use heroin, but there was a reported 90% drop in all other forms of criminality.

Drugs are not the problem, idiots who think they can solve all problems by just making laws against anything they dislike who are the problem.

Re:I'll bet the effect is very mild.

[Shados]

Don't forget that in North America, people pop these pain killers like candies the moment their head feels a little stuffy.

That makes it a bigger deal (of course the fact that they're overused in the first place is an issue in itself)

Re:Zoloft is a 1000 times worse

[grumling]

Yea, I used to think the same thing until I dated a woman who was bipolar. There are people out there with real problems, problems that aren't easily solved by "shake it off and take a lap." You probably went to the wrong doctor, who instead of taking the time to find out what your problem was (or wasn't), put you on the pharma cure.

Re: Zoloft is a 1000 times worse

[Sarten-X]

...a psychiatrist told me that the drugs were about balancing the chemicals in the brain, but I eventually realized that he had taken no measurements or anything before throwing any of them at me.

So what balance was out of whack? What effect would the medications have? Oh wait, he didn't know.

He's likely even more annoyed about it than you are.

The problem is that the imbalances may be located in a small part of the brain, and may be on the order of a few dozen molecules, from any of a few thousand chemicals. Thanks to the blood-brain barrier and the localized nature, the only way to actually measure such chemicals is with very invasive (and probably-lethal) brain surgery. There just isn't a simple test where the doctor can prick your finger, put a drop of blood in a magic machine, and tell you which of your neurons are misbehaving.

For much the same reasons, there are no direct treatments. We can't just poke your amygdala until it works like everyone else - and even if we could, the rest of your brain may not accept the change, and your problems could get worse.

Psychopharmacology is not engineering. The cause-and-effect relationships are not simple or direct. Rather than study in vain all of the chemical interactions in your brain, your doctor has studied in depth all of the medications he prescribes, memorizing all of their many side effects (with incidence rates) and known relationships to other medications.

For the actual treatment, yes, it is purely educated guesswork. In your particular case, you may have showed symptoms of X but not Y, so you're a good candidate for treatment 1. That didn't work at all, so treatments 2 and 3 are ruled out, because they work on the same principles. Treatment 4 might be an option, but it only treats symptom Z, which you don't have, but in a certain percentage of cases it does absolutely nothing for Z and causes inverse symptoms to X and Y. Now, that treatment only begins to work after a three-month buildup, so let's start you on that while also trying treatment 5, which starts working immediately and doesn't interfere with treatment 4. Unfortunately the improvement from treatment 5 is very mild, but it can be improved with treatment 6 which amplifies the effects of 5, but does interact negatively with 4.

These concerns were dismissed and antagonized. I was merely a patient, I needed to learn to obey the doctor. So what did I learn?

We learned that you think you know psychopharmacology better than the person who's studied it for several years.

Only sheer chance got me out with relatively little harm.

Or your stubborn attitude provided the push to develop a coping mechanism on your own, which is also a perfectly valid (though sometimes risky) treatment. When done intentionally (usually involving the field of psychiatry, rather than psychopharmacology), it's more an attempt to change the person to fit their condition, rather than fixing the condition to fit the person.