British Dental Journal 219, E6 (2015)
Published online: 25 September 2015

Paracetamol (click here) overdose secondary to dental pain: a case series

I. Siddique, H. Mahmood & R. Mohammed-Al

Introduction There have been documented cases of serious and life-threatening health effects due to patients taking unintentional analgesia overdose secondary to dental pain. We aimed to determine firstly what proportion of unintentional paracetamol overdose cases admitted to an acute medical assessment unit (MAU) were secondary to dental pain, secondly what proportion of such cases encountered barriers to accessing emergency dental care and finally what clinical burden such cases placed on the hospital services....

Paracetamol is an over the counter pain reliever / analgesic. It is found to be causing overdoes after dental work. I thought it was interesting from the stand point of how people are naive of their own ability to over medicate unintentionally. The USA had something similar with Tylenol over a longer period of time which resulted in liver damage.

People believe the labels. First World countries have people that are label readers. They trust. They trust labels because it is a place where their government is suppose to have authority to warn them of dangers. It would be nice of governments actually did protect citizens rather than allow pharmaceutical companies a pass on protects.

Over doses are serious business. Most people don't worry about overdoes and think more is better to solve their pain problems. When there is going to be significant pain other than over the counter medications should be considered.

Over the Counter medications should have a warning about overdose potential that can harm consumers. Over the past ten years we have seen medications that were once prescribed allowed to be sold directly to consumers. If this is what is to come of self-medication then the dangers have to be made obvious.