Having treated perhaps a hundred cases of Tylenol overdose, I would disagree it has a low margin of safety. You have to take a lot for it to be toxic. The treatment is pretty effective. I don’t know if the UK is overreacting by banning large bottles of paracetamol.
Some people fall into the trap of thinking a lot of medicine is better than a little medicine. But taking 6-8 Extra Strength Tylenol, or 10-12 of the regular pills, is still pretty safe, even if a lower dose is safer and probably almost as effective.
Most pregnant women take acetaminophen for pain, rather than fever. And most minimize the amount of medicine they take and don’t come close to these higher doses.
At the end of the day, I doubt there is a link and it certainly deserves further research.
And generally pregnant women minimize how much of any drug they take. However, as has been mentioned, all the other over-the-counter painkillers are totally off the table–it’s considered the safest of the lot.
When you’re pregnant, it’s very easy for everyone to tell you to avoid everything, to absorb every discomfort and deprivation for the sake of the baby. But everyone else isn’t being asked to give up everything from decaf coffee (it might have a little caffeine!) to soft serve ice cream (listeria!) to lunch meat (sulfites!) to peanut products (allergies!) to hot baths to sleeping on your stomach even when it’s still comfortable. The list goes on and on and on.
Pregnant women have been taking moderate amounts of Tylenol ever since it was introduced. It’s a thing to be careful about, of course. But it’s widely considered to be safe, and suggesting that women shouldn’t take it “just in case” is a great example of how society is always willing to push other people to sacrifice.
I know. I’d be interested in a study of how the kids with the “tantrums” were treated (by parents, educators, and caregivers) for the three days preceding the “tantrums”.
If I was treated the way I see a lot of autistic kids being treated, I’d have a “tantrum” too. (Translation: if you can’t talk, and powerful people are gratuitously mean to you on a regular basis, what else can you do but act in a protesting manner?)
Mostly, AFAICT, the nightmare isn’t being autistic - the nightmare is having to try to learn from those teachers or live with those parents. I have students who are autistic - some with “tantrums” and some without - and I certainly see glaring differences in parenting.
It’s hard to grow up autistic if you have mean stupid parents, harder than if you’re not autistic. What a surprise.
Kids where the least-restrictive environment is a normal classroom are not the kids we are talking about. Have you ever worked in a self-contained autistic unit? Those kids need total support–they often can barely communicate. Their frustration is understandable, but it can result in violent outbursts and it absolutely precludes living independently, ever. To blame that sort of situation on poor parenting is a terrible injustice.
So, taking double the maximum amount for two days in a row poses the risk of toxicity (“can kill you” seems a bit dramatic). A good solution is not to take double the recommended dose (and publicize the risks involved, which we are doing).
Meantime, research has found that taking at least 2 regular-strength aspirin a week (way, way under the maximum suggested dose) over an extended period significantly increases the risk of major gastrointestinal bleeding. Which can kill you. :eek:
Bleeding risk has been found to be elevated in some people even with regular use of low-dose aspirin.
How can we allow such a dangerous medication to be sold over the counter?? :smack:
This is not an accurate summary. The tantrums impact all areas of the spectrum and have nothing whatsoever to do with the quality of parenting. (I’m not sure why you’ve got quotes around tantrums by the way.) They can happen over something as mundane as what is being served for dinner or who the child sat next to on the bus or nothing at all. Some autistic children, and adults, simply become overwhelmed by environmental stimuli and break down. They can scream and bang their heads or bodies against walls or floors for prolonged periods of time before calming down. This is one area where support dogs are helpful.
As far as your statement about the nightmare of being autistic, I suppose it depends on how autistic one is. Without a doubt, those on the spectrum face challenges compared to the neurotypical. Can they live and thrive and have wonderful lives? Of course. For the most part, however, any life challenges they face are not caused by their parents.
Autism and mental retardation are two different conditions. They can occur together, of course (which is an even bigger headache), but I don’t think there’s any correlation. Autistic people, even severely autistic, can be just as intelligent as anyone else (though it’s a lot harder to tell, for the most severe cases where language skills are absent).
Oh, and as an aside, the terminology of “autism spectrum” or “on the spectrum” vaguely annoys me. First of all, assuming it is a spectrum, then everyone is on the spectrum. You’ve got folks like Barack Obama and Winston Churchill on one end, and Rain Man on the other, and most of the rest of us somewhere in between. And second, it’s not even clear that it is a spectrum at all: It’s possible that what we call “autism” is actually a set of unrelated conditions, with different causes, and presumably different effective treatments.
You have a point, but I find it’s a useful terminology when speaking with people who are less familiar with the myriad conditions that get classified as “autism”.
I used to attend church with a family who left because the other parents in their 5-year-old “autistic” son’s Sunday School class got together and told them that their son could not be in the classroom with their own children; this boy thought it was very funny to constantly pinch other children, and nobody could figure out how to make him stop doing this. It broke their hearts to do this, but their children were not safe with this child around. I later found out that he was being evaluated for a rare metabolic disorder that could potentially produce autism-like symptoms. IDK what happened to them after that, because I no longer live in that city.
I also had an online friend on another board (the website shut down) whose son was diagnosed with autism as a toddler. This was when the gluten-free diet as a “cure” for autism was all the rage, and with the permission of their doctors because they had nothing to lose decided to try it for their son. His condition improved so much that their doctors felt that the initial diagnosis was wrong, but they called what he had autism because they didn’t have any other name for it. Last I heard, he was attending mainstream elementary school classes with an aide.
“Intelligence” is another poorly defined concept. But saying that someone who is “severely” autistic can be “just as intelligent” is stretching both concepts beyond breaking point.
Yes, hence my other statement about my disdain about the use of “spectrum”.
The DSM, not a medical but more of a legal reference, grouped autism under mental retardation. It seems that people are moving from one term to the other as the term in use has a negative connotation when people use it outside of the medical context. Stupid, idiot, retard, and now autistic. Wonder what the next term will be.
However, at the end there, you have something that I agree with Melbourne about:
This sounds like a mismanagement of medical terminology by saying spectrum and using the EM spectrum as analogy. I get it though, everyone is on the spectrum so we have that commonality.
That statement about being severely autistic, what does that mean compared to simply retarded? That’s fine if one wants to have more granular diagnoses, but, don’t confuse that with not fitting the current definition of retarded. This also reminds me of two families of which both had retarded children. One accepted this fate, dealt with it and followed known medical protocols for treatment.
The other was in denial and went from doctor to doctor until they found one which stated that their child was autistic. From my recollections of the conversations they would have with my parents at the time, it sounded as if there were doctors that more or less would do that, and parents would flock to them hoping for that diagnoses. And, as it’s a spectrum, standard protocol wouldn’t apply. So, lots of money and time was spent on everything but treatments and protocols that would have worked, and you ended up with an adult who was profoundly retarded, a mute, and had no skills what-so-ever. A very giant child. Poor guy finally makes it to a group home and they only have one methodology in place, he begins to improve and has made significant improvement over the years. It’s actually quite sad as he could probably have been so much better off and all the on-going conditions and other diagnoses probably would not have been presented themselves if a known course of treatment would have been taken.
That above though, that’s why I’m not too keen on the multi-spectral disorder definitions, or statements how one can be severely autistic and then intelligent. Watering down diagnosis and other terminology so people who are already on the internet, who are too lazy to research on their own, have this bizarre scientific “opinion” which further detracts and misguides people.
Calling someone with autism “retarded” is like calling someone missing an arm “paraplegic”. Both certainly have a disability, and the disabilities have something in common, but they’re still different disabilities.
While mods can see the original text of a post, it’s a bit of a hassle, so we don’t usually bother to do it. That wasn’t any secret moderator superpowers; that was just that I happened to load the thread in the time between your original post and when you edited it (and then apparently took a few minutes before I wrote my own post).
When someone says that a person with severe autism is highly intelligent, that’s an indicator to me that they think Dustin Hoffman in “The Rain Man” was an example of “severe” autism.
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