Yeah. Make sure you don’t. Be careful.
Anyone ‘accidentally’ exceeded the recommended dosage before? On what?
What’s the ‘worst’ ::giggle:: thing to do that with?
I think Wal-Mart brand “Antihistabs” are the worstest. Oh yeah.
–Tim
You realize that the recommended dosages are so low that you would have to take a heck of a lot of most things before it does anything to you right? Well at least on things like Tylenol and painkillers, my boyfriend took like 8 pills total of three different brands of painkillers or something along those lines after he got his braces and nothing happened to him, at least not that I know of. I’ve taken more than the recommended dosage of NyQuil and it just knocked me out REALLY well.
Kitty
Teeem (from the other thread), THIS is why you can’t make it to Spanish Class on time? 'cause you exceed recommended dosage???
[mom hat on]
obviously, it depends. Some things if you are an adult and take an extra dose won’t do much more than make you sleepier.
if you are a small person, child etc, the effects of an overdose can be anything up to and including death, but I suspect you knew that.[ mom hat off]
I once took some NyQuil and it didn’t work at all, so I took another dose so I had twice the recommended dosage… still nothing… i waited an hour then took another half a dose, expecting to go into a sudden coma, but still nothing. Instead of getting nice sleepysleepy soyoucanrest medicine, i got insomnia…
A half a Xanax, will calm you down, a whole Xanax will make you a bit numb - TWO Xanax will cure your insomnia with a three hour coma.
Robaxicet will react with alcohol - even 8 hours after you take it. One swallow of beer, and you cant feel you skin.
Be VERY CAREFUL taking too much more Tylenol than the recommended dosage.
My SO very recently had a terminal patient. She took about 20+ extra strength Tylenols (nobody really knew how many).
She wasn’t doing too bad the first couple days, but she - and everyone - knew she was going to die. By the third day she knew something was horribly wrong, and she died soon thereafter from liver failure. And suicides do not get put on the donor list for another liver. It was horribly painful and gruesome, the SO reported - she still is sick from just thinking about it.
In HS, a football player at my school went to the hospital for taking 8 extra strength Tylenol at once - I don’t know exactly what his symptoms were, but he didn’t come back to class for 2 weeks or more.
Oh no, no sir. No tylenol or asprin or anything like that for me.
These antihistabs are crazy. It’s kind of random what happens. You take two (dosage is one) and you’ll either feel completely normal, have your skin go numb, get pissed off for no reason, become narcoleptic, become spastic, or become extremely sensitive to touch. And those are just effects I’ve had so far.
–Tim
some girl at my high school tried to commit suicide with aspirin once… it didn’t work
Not to encourage anyone to do anything stupid, but I have always used more than the recommended dosage. My theory is that the adult dossage has to be easily safe for a 90 pound woman. Being a fat guy who weighs well more than twice that, I figure that to get the same effect I need to take more. On the otherhand, twice as much weight doesn’t nessasarily mean twice as much liver, brain, or whatever is most adversely effected by the drug, so I don’t go too far overboard. On prescription medications I figure the Dr. has already taken the size of my ass into account, so don’t increase it.
I took more than enough prescription (generic) robitussin w/codeine. I was tingling and queasy until I fell asleep. I slept for quite a while though.
The last time I had the flu I accidentally took too much of the cough syrup the MD gave me (two tablespoons instead of two teaspoons, whoops). This also on an empty stomach. In about twenty minutes the room was spinning, but hey, my cough was gone.
And for the record, PLEASE don’t exceed the recommended dose of Tylenol. Although I’ve never known anyone who OD’d on acetominophen, I’ve treated plenty of patients who died of liver failure, and it’s not a pretty sight.
I doubled a dose of my seizure medication once. It was Dilantin, and I’d forgotten to take it the night before. So I (quite stupidly) doubled up in the morning.
By the time I got to work, I felt like I was drunk. I called my doctor, who’s office was only half a block away from where I worked. She insisted I get there right now. So, I walked over there, she drew some blood, and wrote me a note for work, telling my boss that I was going home right now. My boss was okay with that.
I called the guy who was my boyfriend at the time, and he told me to meet him at this little restaurant that we lunched at pretty regularly, just a few blocks away. I did, and found him sitting with a very well-dressed gentleman, who looked very familiar, but I couldn’t quite remember his name. My boyfriend introduced him to me as Jerry. I smiled, shook his hand, and told him I was sorry if I acted a little loopy, but I’d accidentally overdosed on my seizure meds. The gentleman looked a little surprised. My boyfriend looked a lot pissed.
When we got to my boyfriend’s car, he said “hey, didn’t you know who that man was?” I said “I know his face. Where do I know him from?” My boyfriend says “That was the mayor, dear. You didn’t really need to tell him that you’d taken too much medication.” I said “Sorry.”
My boyfriend took me home, and I set the phone right next to the big comfy chair in the living room (my doctor said she was going to call me as soon as she got the lab results), and promptly fell asleep in said chair. About three hours later, the phone rings, and it’s my doctor. “Thank goodness you answered this time,” she says. “If you hadn’t answered, I was going to send an ambulance.” I said “Huh? I didn’t hear the phone until just now.” She says “This is the fifth time I’ve tried to call, in the last hour and a half.” Apparently my med levels were pretty freaking high. But by the time I did wake up, I felt much better!
A pharmacist told me once it was ok to double the dose of Benedryl for your kid, it would just calm them down. He called it “Mom little helper”. I go somewhere else now.
Last year I had a bad toothache and took too much Advil.
I pissed blood! :eek:
I didn’t tell my dentist that, but i did tell him I was taking Advil for the pain. He told me not to take too many because they can be hard on the kidneys and you can end up with blood in your urine.
:rolleyes: Now you tell me!
I have take 4 I have take 4 advil at one time. Or 3 or 4 regular strength aspirin. Or 3 Alieve. Very often over the counter drugs are the same drugs that are given in prescription form, just a lower dose to lower the chance of side effects. I was advised by my Doctor that 4 Advil were fine to take some pain that I was in and cheaper then the prescription he would write me if they didn’t work.
I don’t know how much Advil you were taking pkbites. I have taken four Advil twice a day and never had any problems.
Warning - This is not medical advice! Please consult your Doctor. 
It is true that the OTC “recommended dosage” is usually lower than the prescription dosage.
However, often the prescription dosage assumes that you aren’t taking the medication at that dosage every day of your life. Presumably, a doctor would write the prescription for a limited time, and if you still needed something when the prescription was used up, he would want to try another type of treatment rather than risk using the high dosage for extended periods.
So, if you have to take more than what the bottle says for a day or two after an injury, you’re probably ok. If you find that you have to do that on a regular basis, you should be seeing a doctor for whatever is causing you to take so much medicine.
Tylenol (acetaminophen) is supposed to be safe for your stomach, right? However, prolonged use or overdose can be dangerous to your liver. You can live without a stomach. You wouldn’t do too well without a liver.
I work in a hospital and have seen a few people who have tried to commit suicide by Tylenol overdose. Bad plan. Number one, it usually doesn’t work. Number two, the antidote, a chemical called Muco-Myst is nasty tasting and requires multiple dosages. Third, you risk liver damage, which is a slow painful death. I don’t recommend this.
In my experience, most Tylenol attempts are people who don’t want to die, but want attention. My advice if this is you…
Flush a bunch of pills down the toilet, pretend to be passed out until someone finds you and brings you to the emergency room. This way you don’t have to eat charcoal, get your stomach pumped, or get committed for 90 days, but you’ll still scare whoever you want to scare.
My doctor also told me I could take 4 Advil at a time. I get migraines and he said when I first feel one coming on, to take 4 gel-tab Advils right away. The gel-tabs get into your system faster. It seems to work pretty well.
When I get a real whopper of a migraine, I do have Imitrex (which is a crapshoot as far as whether or not it will work) and some wonderful pills with butabital & codiene.
But the Advil will help keep one at bay most of the time. I have wondered about what all that Advil is doing to my insides.
During migraines, I used to take up to 6 Tylenol 3’s within an hour or so. The only side effect was nasuea. Of course, it’s really hard on your liver and kidneys, so that was my turning point with pain killers. I started weaning myself off of them, and now if 3 extra strength Tylenol’s doesn’t do it, I live with it. With chronic migraines, I try to be very concious of the cumulative effect of pain killers.
Tussaminic DH Forte… My boyfriend took too much once. It made him very drunk. I have taken too much (just a little) and it knocked me out for a LONG time. It kinda scares me that it can be so potent, but it is prescription.
I did. After my second oral surgery several years ago, the oral surgeon sent me home with 2 prescriptions (anti-biotics and painkillers) which I gave to my dad to pick up and took over the living room couch for an extended period of moaning and suffering (since it was the second one, I knew how it was gonna feel). He left the house–and didn’t come back for about 6 hours. In the meantime, I had ended up taking 8 or 10 (I don’t remember which) Tylenol in that time. My little sister hid the bottle after that, because she was worried something terrible would happen if I took many more.