aspirin

Article

aspirin is a recurring brand in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between February 05, 2021 and August 13, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “Drug 1 is aspirin”; “Like every medication, including Tylenol, aspirin, etc”; “There are lots of anti-inflammatory drugs (aspirin is one, ibuprofen is another)“. It most often appears alongside COVID, FDA, SSRI.

Metadata

  • Category: Brands
  • Mention count: 3
  • Issue count: 3
  • First seen: February 05, 2021
  • Last seen: August 13, 2024

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

February 05, 2021 · Original source
Drug 1 is aspirin. Drug 2 is warfarin, which causes 40,000 ER visits a year and is widely considered one of the most dangerous drugs in common use. I challenge anyone to figure out, using WebMD's side effects list alone, that warfarin is more dangerous than aspirin. I think this is because if WebMD said "aspirin is pretty safe and most people don't need to worry about it", people might use aspirin irresponsibly, die, and then their ghosts might sue WebMD. Or if WebMD said "warfarin can be dangerous, be careful with this one", people might refuse to take warfarin because "the Internet said it was dangerous", die of the stuff warfarin is supposed to treat, and then their ghosts might sue WebMD. WebMD solves this by never giving the tiniest shred of useful information to anybody.
December 22, 2021 · Original source
What are the risks? Like every medication, including Tylenol, aspirin, etc, Luvox has some common minor side effects and some rare major ones. But let’s step back a second. Fluvoxamine is a bog-standard SSRI. Its side effects are generic SSRI side effects. We give SSRIs to 30 million people a year, or about 10% of all Americans. As a psychiatrist, I’m not supposed to say flippant things like “we give SSRIs out like candy”. We do careful risk-benefit analysis and when appropriate we screen patients for various risk factors. But after we do all that stuff, we give them to 10% of Americans, compared to 12% of Americans who got candy last Halloween. So you can draw your own conclusion about how severe we think the risks are.
August 13, 2024 · Original source
Most of the relevant papers say the drugs work by preventing inflammation. This is a catch-all term for the immune response to microbes; although it helps fight the microbes, it’s slightly toxic to the rest of the body and generally bad unless you’re actively fighting an infection. In chronic inflammation, ie the thing most of us with modern diets have all the time, general bad health damages the body, the immune system mistakes the damage for a microbial infection, and it provokes a constant low-grade inflammatory response. This is bad, so (if you’re not fighting an infection) anti-inflammatories are generally pretty useful. There are lots of anti-inflammatory drugs (aspirin is one, ibuprofen is another), but inflammation is a multifaceted process and no one drug can stop it entirely.