How Opiophobia Paved the Way for Tylenol Hysteria
/By Crystal Lindell
The dirty little secret about alternatives to opioids is that they are all mostly bullshit.
They’re expensive, sometimes outright dangerous, and perhaps worst of all, ineffective.
So when doctors are telling you that you don’t need opioids to treat your pain, what they are really saying is that you don’t need pain treatment at all.
And that’s exactly the message that people are getting from the Trump administration’s recent guidance to avoid taking Tylenol while pregnant.
Specifically, the administration is now advising women not to use acetaminophen — which goes by the brand name Tylenol — for pain and fever during pregnancy due to claims that it raises the risk of their babies developing autism.
Aside from the fact that science behind this claim is not definitive, the other major problem is that there is no safe alternative to acetaminophen that a woman can take for pain and fever while pregnant. Over-the-counter pain relievers like aspirin and ibuprofen can damage the kidneys of unborn babies.
President Trump admitted as much during the press conference about the new guidance, putting the onus on pregnant women to “tough it out” by not taking Tylenol
“Sadly, first question, what can you take instead? It's actually, there's not an alternative to that,” Trump said. “And as you know, other medicines are absolutely proven bad. I mean, they've been proven bad, the aspirins and the Advils and others, right?
“But if you can't tough it out, if you can't do it, that's what you're going to have to do. You'll take a Tylenol, but it'll be very sparingly.”
That’s a genuinely inhumane response to the pain pregnant women often endure, because what he’s really saying is that you just should not treat pain while pregnant. It’s also on-brand messaging for an opiophobic country that’s been dismissing everyone’s pain for almost a decade now.
As it turns out, when you tell people that their pain doesn’t deserve to be treated by opioids, then it’s a quick path to the idea that pain shouldn’t be treated by other substances, be they cannabis or kratom or Tylenol.
In the end, it all really comes down to a fundamental question of whether or not pain is worthy of treatment.
And unfortunately, for many healthcare professionals and government officials, the answer is a resounding “no.” They do not believe that pain is worthy of treatment – as long as it’s not their pain. Because, make no mistake, when these types of policies come out, that’s exactly who they apply to: other people.
They know that they themselves will get to use opioids if and when the time comes that they need them for their own pain. And they don’t expect to have a pregnancy themselves, so of course they don’t care if pregnant women can’t have their pain treated.
It's why Trump can so dismissively say "there's no downside in not taking it." He means there is no downside to him if you don’t take Tylenol.
But for pregnant women, there most certainly is a downside. Failing to treat fever and significant pain can pose serious risks to both the mother and baby, resulting in miscarriages, birth defects, depression, infections and high blood pressure.
Enduring untreated pain can wear you down in ways you can’t even predict. It will destroy your sleep, steal your hope, and even make you mean. When it’s your pain, you’ll do anything to make it stop.
Pain is a medical condition on its own, and “toughing it out” is not an effective treatment. Until we as patients and voters demand better, I fear both the government and our healthcare system will continue chipping away at the pain treatments we still have — until there is literally nothing left but silent prayers and fleeting wishes.
