500 deaths (many intentional attempts at suicide) in a country of 350M where arguably every household has acetaminophen present is incredibly low.

By comparison, the number of accidental firearm deaths is around 430 per year, and somewhere around 40% of US households have a firearm. So we can say that having acetaminophen in the house is roughly as dangerous as having a firearm in the house. Obviously this is not some kind of direct comparison between firearms and acetaminophen.

I included the statistic in the first place because I thought it didn’t make sense to cherry pick the scariest statistics. I’m not fearmongering here, just trying to illustrate that acetaminophen should be treated with more care than we currently do. I think we could be making better health policy decisions about which medications are OTC and which aren’t, although this topic is incredibly complicated and doesn’t just come down to simple facts like toxicity.

I wouldn’t use accidental gun deaths when acetaminophen is often used in suicides. There are 25,000 of those with guns each year in the US.

But yes, acetaminophen is a drug, can be dangerous and shouldn’t be treated as benign.

Do you have numbers for how often acetaminophen are used in suicides?

Yes, agree with everything factual you said. I guess the problem isn't the compound itself but rather not enough information regarding its use.

I personally keep tylenol in the house because it's probably the best non-narcotic non-NSAID pain medicine.

We use it all the time in patients who are elderly with decreased renal function because they don't do well with opiates or NSAIDs (ibuprofen)