Does This Pain Killer Kill Common Sense?
Are you feeling risky today?
It may be because you’ve taken some acetaminophen, according to this article.
Research suggests that while you are fighting pain and fever with something that has been around for many years, you might also lose caution or fear when considering taking an action you’d otherwise deem too risky.
Other possible psychological effects include reduced empathy and blunted cognitive functions.
So what’s going on here? Well, the bottom line with all medications, both old and new, is they have side effects. Humanity provides solutions to medical problems that we are unable or unwilling to develop to the point where we can direct it only to its intended target.
There is an inherent trust that medication is good for us instilled by our parents or caregivers from an early age, and in most cases the parents learned this from their parents, and so on. The truth is we may have something that does help its intended purpose, but we don’t understand exactly how or why that solution also impacts other aspects of the body in unwanted ways.
Some side effects may even be marketable for another purpose, such as Viagra. But each time we ingest medication we are exposing our entire body through the bloodstream to that medicine, where it will interact as it pleases in ways we apparently aren’t able to predict.
Think about it. If your finger hurts you take a pill to make the pain go away, but that same pill passes through every area of your body, even the parts that don’t hurt. In hindsight, it is foolish not to expect it to do things other than reduce pain in the finger. We just aren’t smart enough yet to code it to ignore everything else.
Hopefully in the future we will have all medications coded in such a way they only impact the area they are meant to and side effects such as nausea, high-blood pressure, or headaches will become a thing of the past. Until then we need to decide if the side effects are worth the cure, even the side effects we did not know about.
Will you still take medication realizing how uncertain we are where they will influence your body? Please comment below.
