This Podcast Will Kill You

Ep 120 Acetaminophen/Paracetamol: Pain. Killer.

It’s safe to assume that the vast majority of you have a bottle or blister pack of acetaminophen/paracetamol/Tylenol/Panadol in your home medicine cabinet, and an even vaster majority of you have taken the medicine at some point in your life. After all, acetaminophen/paracetamol is one of the most, if not the most, widely used medications worldwide. Despite its near ubiquity, many unanswered questions remain. How does it actually work? Should safe dosage guidelines be revisited? Why on earth does it have multiple names? And finally, who was responsible for the Tylenol murders in 1982? In this jam-packed episode, we do our best to make sense of the mysteries surrounding this drug, weaving our way from the pharmaceutical nitty gritty of acetaminophen/paracetamol to the bizarre story of its discovery, from the horrific crimes that shocked a nation and revolutionized consumer safety standards to the ongoing discussions of whether we’re under- or overestimating how safe this medication actually is.

      
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This podcast might not actually kill you, but Erin Welsh and Erin Allmann Updyke cover so many things that can. In each episode, they tackle a different topic, teaching listeners about the biology, history, and epidemiology of a different disease or medical mystery. They do the scientific research, so you don’t have to.
 
Since 2017, Erin and Erin have explored chronic and infectious diseases, medications, poisons, viruses, bacteria and scientific discoveries. They’ve researched public health subjects including plague, Zika, COVID-19, lupus, asbestos, endometriosis and more.

Each episode is accompanied by a creative quarantini cocktail recipe and a non-alcoholic placeborita.

Erin Welsh, Ph.D. is a co-host of the This Podcast Will Kill You. She is a disease ecologist and epidemiologist and works full-time as a science communicator through her work on the podcast. Erin Allmann Updyke, MD, Ph.D. is a co-host of This Podcast Will Kill You. She’s an epidemiologist and disease ecologist currently in the final stretch of her family medicine residency program.

This Podcast Will Kill You is part of the Exactly Right podcast network that provides a platform for bold, creative voices to bring to life provocative, entertaining and relatable stories for audiences everywhere. The Exactly Right roster of podcasts covers a variety of topics including science, true crime, comedic interviews, news, pop culture and more. Podcasts on the network include My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark, Buried Bones, That's Messed Up: An SVU Podcast and more.