What I want to know, and no article I’ve ever seen (including Cecil’s) mentions, is this: Is the liver damage done by acetaminophen + alcohol permanent and irreversible? If you get too much of this combination of drugs and suffer damage (even if not quite fatal), is that permanent?
One sees mention often of people being hospitalized and treated for this. What does that treatment consist of? What does it accomplish? Does treatment cure the damage, or allow a damaged liver to heal eventually? Or does treatment merely keep the patient alive and damaged forever, as opposed to letting an untreated patient die?
My recollection is that survival rates are decent in this scenario, but transplant is rather common. I say, “Thanks, but no thanks” and avoid acetaminophen at all costs.
If the situation has changed in the last 6 years I missed the update.
This sounds extreme, considering that other OTC pain relievers (i.e. NSAIDS) come with a higher risk of problems, even with occasional use.
Take the recommended dose of acetominophen and the likelihood of liver damage or other problems is extremely low.
*"The minor aminotransferase elevations that occur during chronic therapy with acetaminophen *(indicative of some cellular damage) are rarely symptomatic, generally go undetected, resolve rapidly with discontinuation of acetaminophen and sometimes even with continuation at the same dose."
The real problem is when people unknowingly take multiple meds containing acetominophen and overdose, and/or have risk factors (like alcohol intake) that worsen liver damage.
There’s another problem in that many opiates are coupled with acetaminophen, not so much for medical reasons, but rather to prevent “abuse”, not unlike how denatured alcohol was used during alcohol prohibition. You might have, for instance, 5 mg. of oxycodone in a tablet containing 375 mg. of acetaminophen.
What happens, of course, is that people, probably being ignorant of the danger posed by acetaminophen, take much larger doses of acetaminophen in an attempt to get a meaningful dose of the opiate. Using the above example, in order to get a 30 mg. dose of oxycodone, one would end up taking 2250 mg. of acetaminophen. I wonder how many cases of accidental poisoning this policy causes?