Why Does Tylenol Cause Chronic Illnesses Like Autism?
Last week, President Trump was scheduled to give remarks on the potential causes of autism
Shortly beforehand, the press became aware Trump would focus on the link between Tylenol and autism (which some theorized was due to NIH scientists leaking that information), resulting in the national media collectively ridiculing that link immediately before the press conference.
Possibly in response to this, the President then gave a very different press conference, which was arguably what the autism community has been waiting decades for.
In that press conference, Trump stated:
•He had felt very strongly about bringing attention to vaccines and autism for 20 years and that solving this was more important to him than the economy (which is typically Trump’s number one focus).
•He felt that we were giving too many shots too quickly and they needed to be spaced out (which is true, as severe vaccine injuries become increasingly likely the more closely and earlier vaccines are taken—but the medical field has refused to acknowledge this and reduce vaccine injuries as doing so would be akin to an admission vaccines are not “100 percent safe”).
•He believed there was no reason to give the hepatitis B vaccine prior to children being 12 (which, as I showed here, is true).
•That Tylenol increases the risk of autism, so if possible, it should be avoided during pregnancy and you should not give it to infants.
Note: in addition to his public statements repeatedly linking vaccines to autism despite facing widespread criticism for them (e.g., consider his response at a 2016 presidential debate), multiple associates of Trump’s family have explained to me why Trump is personally invested in ending vaccine induced autism.
After which Secretary Kennedy stated:
Some 40 to 70 percent of mothers who have children with autism believe that their child was injured by a vaccine. President Trump believes that we should be listening to these mothers instead of gaslighting and marginalize them like prior administrations.
Some of our friends like to say that we should believe all women. Some of these same people have been silencing and demonizing these mothers for three decades because research on the potential link between autism and vaccines has been actively suppressed in the past. It will take time for an honest look at this topic by scientists.
As I heard this announcement, like many, I felt this was remarkable progress on a previously unsolvable issue.
I was also grateful Trump drew mainstream attention to the concept it was not necessarily a good idea to “treat” an uncomfortable fever, and noted that his repeated statement that pregnant mothers should do their best to “tough it out” rather than take Tylenol was very similar to conversations I’d had throughout COVID with non-pregnant patients.
However, after I thought about it a bit more, I realized it might not have been a good decision on Trump’s part to implore people to avoid taking something that was actually toxic.
The next day, to show they believed in Science, numerous pregnant mothers began posting videos of themselves taking large amounts of Tylenol (which I compiled on X here).
These include a pregnant gynecologist training in fertility medicine showing off taking Tylenol, along with a nurse (I’ve previously corresponded with) sharing the tragic story of a 23-25 week pregnant mother who’d done this and destroyed her liver.
These events, in short, highlight why there are serious but largely unaddressed issues with Tylenol.
Over the Counter Pain Management
Because of how uncomfortable pain is, pain treatments have long been a core market in medicine. Remarkably however, most of the standard pain therapies have serious issues and often progress patients to needing more and more severe interventions.
Steroids, for example, have a myriad of often severe side effects, and when injected into joints, weaken the ligaments, hence providing temporary relief at the expense of the joint, which in turn causes the patient to eventually require a joint or spine surgery (which often creates a host of permanent issues).
Typically, the first line treatment for pain is to get an over-the-counter pain medication, of which a few exist in the USA: acetaminophen (Tylenol), ibuprofen (e.g., Advil or Motrin), naproxen (e.g., Aleve or Naprosyn), aspirin or topical diclofenac (Voltaren gel).
Unfortunately, these medications (with the possible exception of topical diclonfenac) all have a dose-dependent toxicity, and typically only elicit a partial improvement in pain. As such, patients frequently take additional doses to further reduce their pain which is often quite dangerous (or alternately, they overdose to commit suicide).
Many, in turn, consider NSAIDs (e.g., ibuprofen and naproxen along with stronger prescription NSAIDs) among the most hazardous drugs in the U.S. because:
- They are the leading cause of drug-related hospital admissions—often due to heart attacks, strokes, bleeding, and kidney failure (e.g., at least 107,000 Americans are admitted to hospitals each year for NSAID GI bleeds).
- Kidney damage is a significant risk. One study found a 20% increased risk of kidney disease from NSAIDs; others found up to 212%. Amongst kidney failure patients, 65.7% were found to be chronic NSAID users.
- NSAIDs raise cardiovascular risks. NSAIDS also increase the risk of heart attacks and death (e.g., extensive studies have found between a 24-326 percent increase1,2,3). Two of the worst ones, Vioxx (Merck) and Celebrex (Pfizer), were designed to reduce stomach bleeding but instead caused heart attacks and strokes. Merck hid data on Vioxx’s risks; eventually it was withdrawn after an estimated 120,000 deaths. Celebrex, still on the market, has been linked to 75,000 deaths. Merck’s handling of Vioxx later informed how pharma pushed the HPV vaccine and mRNA vaccines.
- Gastrointestinal bleeding is common and often fatal. In 1999, over 16,000 Americans died from it. NSAIDs also cause small bowel damage in over 50% of chronic users—often undetected—leading to “small bowel enteropathy” and possibly chronic illness through gut permeability.
- They impair healing, especially of ligaments, creating long-term re-injury risk.
Trials alleging the benefit of NSAIDs are frequently intentionally deceptive and frequently create the illusion of a benefit where none exists. What this means is that many patients ruin their lives with drugs that did almost nothing for them in the first place.—Peter Gøtzsche
Unfortunately, NSAIDs remain amongst the most commonly prescribed drugs, and are frequently given for musculoskeletal injuries.
Note: the dangers of NSAIDs are discussed further here.
The poor efficacy of the OTC pain medications, along with their significant toxicity, in turn was one of the primary reasons I spent the last year of my life trying to bring attention to DMSO.
This is because DMSO is dramatically more effective than any other over the counter option (e.g., I compiled a large volume of literature demonstrating that here, and I have now received well over a thousand reports from readers saying it produced miraculous improvements in pain)—essentially making it a crime a safe and affordable pain solution is not available to the public.
Lastly, since the current topic at hand is maternal safety during childbirth (where NSAIDs are strongly advised against due to a variety of issues they create for the fetus), many questions have been raised over if DMSO can be used instead.
In turn, I have seen a lot of data suggesting DMSO is safe for the fetus (compiled here), seen numerous studies where pregnant mothers who received it had healthy children, and know the German DMSO community has not observed any issues from taking it while pregnant or while breastfeeding (whereas in contrast it has greatly helped developmentally delayed children).
Likewise, we frequently use DMSO to treat mastitis while breastfeeding, and have not observed any issues from it.
Conversely, numerous reports show that if DMSO is injected directly into developing fetuses it causes birth defects (which is vastly different from the minute concentrations which will reach the fetus from topical applications), one study found that injecting pure DMSO into the abdomens of developing mice impaired neuronal development while a third found higher concentrations than achieved through topical applications impaired early neuronal development.
Given all of this, I think topical DMSO, when needed is most likely safe during pregnancy (or at least safer than the alternatives), but it has never been formally studied, as due to the politics surrounding thalidomide when DMSO was discovered, the DMSO field made a decision to simply never use it in pregnant women.
That said, within the scientific literature, as far as I know, no cases of any toxicity to the offspring of animals from topical skin applications of DMSO to the pregnant mother have ever been reported.
Tylenol Toxicity
Tylenol (acetaminophen or paracetamol) is one of the few over-the-counter alternatives to NSAIDs and is generally considered safer than NSAIDs (making it frequently be a common alternative to them), though, it too, is often ineffective for severe pain.
Still, while less toxic than NSAIDs, it carries a major risk—when metabolized, it has three different ways the liver can break it down, two of which are relatively harmless and one of which that produces the metabolite NAPQI (N-acetyl-p-benzoquinone imine) which is highly toxic to liver cells because it irreversibly binds to essential cellular proteins.
Typically, relatively little NAPQI is produced and quickly neutralized by liver glutathione. However when too much Tylenol is taken, the other detoxification pathways get saturated, shunting Tylenol metabolism to the NAPQI pathway, at which point the limited glutathione stores of the liver can get used up, and rapid liver death from unneutralized NAPQI ensues.
As a result, Tylenol overuse leads to 56,000 ER visits, 2,600 hospitalizations, and 500 deaths annually in America.
Note: certain conditions lower Tylenol’s toxicity threshold and hence increase the likelihood of an overdose (e.g., chronic alcohol use, malnutrition, fasting, eating disorders, chronic liver disease, certain medications, older age, and genetic variability in liver metabolism).
Additionally, Tylenol also has a few other major issues:
•NAPQI is also toxic to the kidneys, and in 1-2% of overdose cases (with some sources saying 2-10%) the kidneys are also damaged. Within FAERS (which misses most reports), one study identified 1,288 reports of APAP-associated kidney injury, which disproportionately affected younger patients (and according to the study’s methods, were 2.4 times more likely than ibuprofen to cause kidney injuries).
•Many studies associate gastrointestinal side effects with Tylenol use. In one review, their ranges were as follows: abdominal pain (3.9-5.4 percent), diarrhea (2.2-5.9 percent), dyspepsia (0.9-6.3 percent), nausea (1.5-5.4 percent), vomiting (1.6-1.6 percent). overall GI AEs (7.9-9.0 percent), medically significant GI AEs (5.3-5.3 percent), serious GI events requiring hospitalization (0.2-0.3 percent).
•In one review, Tylenol was found to increase the risk of the following conditions: bleeding or perforated peptic ulcers (+6–121 percent), uncomplicated peptic ulcers (+4–115 percent), lower GI bleed (+15–145 percent), heart failure (+9–98 percent), myocardial infarction (+0–73 percent), hypertension (+7–62 percent), chronic renal failure (+19–129 percent).
•A systematic review identified data suggesting chronic Tylenol use increased blood pressure (a 4mmHg rise in hypertensive patients), increased asthma (a possible 15% increase), caused a 3.6-3.7 increase in gastric bleeding (which increased further with concurrent NSAID use), and had a possible association with end stage kidney disease (being responsible for 10% of cases).
•Tylenol has been associated with an increased risk of blood cancers, +16 percent from low use and +84 percent from high use (with the increase being roughly double in women). Additionally, the following increases were seen with high use: myeloid neoplasms (+126 percent) plasma cell disorders (+142 percent), other mature B-Cell neoplasms (+81 percent)—with smaller increases being seen from lower doses.
•Tylenol has been associated with rashes and hypersensitivity reactions, has a required warning label for causing Steven-Johnson syndrome (a severe hypersensitive reaction where skin peels off), and in one review, was found to cause hypersensitivity reactions in 10.1 percent of children undergoing oral challenges.
•In children of mothers chronically using Tylenol, a review found the following increases: hyperkinetic disorder (+37 percent), ADHD medication use (+29 percent), autism spectrum disorder with hyperkinetic symptoms (+51 percent), asthma in offspring from frequent use in late pregnancy (+110 percent), asthma in offspring from any use during pregnancy (+15–17 percent), undescended testicles (with the greatest increased risk being seen if used for over 2 weeks in the second trimester).
Note: since vaccines cause fevers, many have pointed out it’s possible some of the increase in neurodevelopmental disorders from Tylenol is actually due to maternal vaccinations taken during pregnancy.
•A recent systematic review of 46 studies which had been conducted on the risk of Tylenol during pregnancy causing neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs) in offspring found the majority of studies detected an increased risk, that those of higher quality were much more likely to detect the association, and that the increase was dose dependent. The increased NDDs included autism, ADHD, and other NDDs affecting learning, social/motor skills, attention, cognition, emotions, and behavior.
Note: this study is arguably the most definitive proof Tylenol is not safe during pregnancy and was the one Trump and RFK’s team highlighted at their recent vaccine announcement.
This is taken from a long document. Read the rest here midwesterndoctor.com
Header image: Walgreens
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