Pain meds - the kind you get over-the-counter - are popular purchases with every person on earth, to be sure. But no one really knows what is in them or what makes them tick, a new study finds. Now does one need to know what is in the drugs one takes? Can't one just pop something appropriate and go about one's own business? Not really; over-the-counter drugs, even if they don't need any professional prescribing, are still chemicals. They still do need a certain amount of caution and expertise for safe use. When people don't understand how exactly these things work or what is in them, the potential for overuse or misuse is dangerously high.
The study finds that only one out of three people know that Tylenol is acetaminophen, for instance. And only one out of two people know that Motrin and Advil are ibuprofen. So what happens when people use Tylenol incorrectly? Is it capable of doing anything to the body? It certainly is - reckless use of acetaminophen is actually an important cause of liver failure in young, healthy people. One of the biggest causes of acetaminophen poisoning in young people is that they take some Tylenol and then some other drug, one after the other, not realizing that they all contain acetaminophen. It can add up and it can destroy the liver. This was a study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
The study shows that a problem like this involving ill-advised use of pain meds exists mainly in people who are poorly educated - at a level below the sixth grade. These are the people who will easily resort to pain meds without properly understanding what they do and how they work. Adding to all the confusion, many of these drugs have confusing labeling. Even when people with education issues do what they can to read the label, these chemicals are often named using alternative names and terminology. Acetaminophen is sometimes termed APAP on drug packaging, for instance.
There's been other research done that's found that parents of young children often have a lot of trouble understanding how much of a liquid medication they need to give their children. Package labeling is confusing to most people - even when they happen to be well-educated. A lot of the problem comes from how manufacturers label their products carelessly and in a very confusing way. They hardly seem to try to label their products in a way that people might understand them.