Be Very Afraid!

Are you as annoyed as I am by the commercials and media reports that alert us to dangers in our everyday lives that are, to say the least, remote? The latest one concerns acetaminophen (Tylenol), the one analgesic that has so far emerged unscathed from the Cox-2 (e.g. Vioxx) and the NSAID (e.g. Advil) heart-attack wars.

We felt that a couple of Tylenols taken for a headache couldn’t hurt us. But now, surprise! The Nurses Health Study has shown that the chances of developing high blood pressure are almost doubled in women who used Tylenol. NSAIDS had a lesser risk, and aspirin had none, but we know that these drugs ‘erode the stomach lining’, which is as bad, or worse, than high blood pressure. You can read about this new study in the journal Hypertension.

Compared with the risk of being obese, taking Tylenol for a headache is a very small risk indeed.  (If it were a major risk, we’d have discovered it years ago.)  Yet people will continue to be obese, and others will continue to smoke; they’re ignoring much bigger risks.  So don’t worry so much.  The media delight in spreading bad news.  It’s enough to give you an Exedrin headache.

Update on Fri, August 26, 2005 at 01:52PM by Robert Griffith

Further to the above . . . Another of the effects of unreasonable fear is the enormous amount of money spent on bottled water and water purifiers.  The manufacturers of these commodities have subtly inferred that tap water is totally unsafe, and expect us to buy their product – at a price approaching that of gasoline in some cases!

In 1999 the National Resources Defense Council ran 1,000 tests of more than 100 brands of bottled water and concluded that bottled water is not necessarily any purer or any safer than city tap water.  “Some bottled water is of very high quality and is very pure; other brands of bottled water contain elevated levels of arsenic, bacteria, or other contaminants.  Also, bottled water costs hundreds or thousands of times more per gallon than tap water”.  See their website.

Many people go through life being afraid of extremely improbable dangers.  You’ll be a lot happier if you aren’t one of them.  If you’re worried about something that you don’t really understand, get more information on the subject!