An article study that recently came out, showing that Acetaminophen may be a trigger for teen asthma attacks. Now, why do I bring this up? Anytime I see an article like this that gets out into the public I am constantly reminded that as medical professionals, we need to understand what these studies are saying and we need to be able to speak intelligently about them should we receive a question from one of our patients. It’s important because the news media will go out there and put something like this out on the internet or out on the websites or on their health pages in the newspapers and what happens is that patients hear this and change the way that they’re medicating themselves. We should always always be educating our patients that if you read some article, you need to check with you healthcare professional. The person who told you to take a certain medication, to use a certain nutritional supplement, whatever the case may be, don’t just stop taking something until you’ve contacted the medical professional who told you to take it.
This is true for something as inane as Tylenol. It is not a dangerous drug when used appropriately and even though this study showed that there was an increased asthma risk for some patients, that asthmas risk is still not that great. I mean, it’s an increased risk for an existing patient that has asthma but it may not be necessarily an indication that you should stop taking Tylenol. So, we need to be able to educate our patients whenever studies that talk about medications come out and reach news headlines because ultimately, a lot of our patient just go “Oh, we can’t use Tylenol anymore”, and they might switch to something else that is not as appropriate to treat the problem at hand that may cause other side effects and switching from one analgesic to another over the counter, probably not too much of an issue but if you have patients that were put on Tylenol because they have GI issues and the family of NSAIDs, the anti inflammatories out there cause these patients typically to have more risk of GI bleeds, well an isolated lower risk of a possible asthma attack might be just the less significant problem to deal with than a patient developing a slow GI bleed by taking too much of an Ibuprofen or some other over the counter anti inflammatory medication for pain management.
So we need to be able to speak intelligently about what we’re seeing and be able to educate our patients about “hey, when you read something, don’t just read the headline, read the whole article”, because as for instance, and I’ll just slide down here at the very bottom of this article, the authors of the study say that it is a safe drug and there’s no imminent threat to patients but for some people at high risk, it might be important for their prescribers to advise them appropriately about whether this drug would be a good choice for them. This is the standard disclaimer but it’s all the way at the bottom of the article so we need to go ahead and educate our patients that don’t just read the headlines. The headlines are out there to freak you out, they are used to cause a little bit of a fear reaction so you’ll read the article, that’s how headlines are written. patients should understand that and not have a knee-jerk reaction to just reading a headline because of course the headline doesn’t tell the whole story and you need to have the whole story and then talk to a medical professional like your nurse to go ahead and find out what exactly this particular article means.
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This article has been featured in the news segment of the Nursing Show podcast episode Acetaminophen Medication Review for Nurses and Episode 144.
