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

Headache

[irrational_design]

There is surely a joke about "Not tonight dear, I have a headache" here somewhere.

Re:Headache

[kuzb]

The most common problem here is that men open with the wrong question.

"Would you like some Aspirin, dear?"

"No, I don't have a headache"

"Eeeexcellent"

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.

= paracetamol

[ebcdic]

Most of the world calls this drug paracetamol.

Re:= paracetamol

[Malc]

Growing up in the UK, I'd never heard of Tylenol until I moved to Canada as an adult. You occasionally hear it on American TV shows these days, but unless you know what the characters are referring to, it will just pass most people by. Even "acetaminophen" is an unknown term in the UK, it's always just "paracetamol"

Tylenol is most definitely a N. American thing that nobody else knows about. Panadol seems to be the generic antipodean headache drug - I know this because my wife is Aussie and after six years in London she's still confusing people by saying "panadol" instead of "paracetamol" :)

Re:Zoloft is a 1000 times worse

[Shakrai]

The best anti-depressant I have found is distance running. The second best is other forms of cardio exercise. SSRIs or SNRIs? Been there, done that, they did very little to help me with depression. I don't even think they took the edge off, although it's hard to prove that negative. Tried Celexa, Zoloft, Effexor, Prozac, and a few other ones. Not only did they fail to address (or even make manageable) the depression, they all came with a lovely side effect and then six months of the other extreme when I discontinued them.

Re: Zoloft is a 1000 times worse

[Anonymous Coward]

Doctors lack a fundamental understanding of the effect the drugs they prescribe for mental health treatment, and are effectively guessing as to what they think will work.

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

That the doctor, while purportedly concerned, was hardly treating me in a sound and reasonable manner, but was behaving in a way that worsened my problems and caused me several more issues.

Only sheer chance got me out with relatively little harm.

Maybe Zoloft, or Prozac, or whatever is serving you. There are others who are being damaged by the worst kind of treatment. One with delusions of grandeur.

I'd have been safer going to an herb shop and inhaling a potpourri.