Tylenol is a brand. Acetominophen was created in 1878 (or 1852, depending on who you ask).
e: That doesn't make RFKJr not wrong and insane, in case it needed saying.
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Paracetamol was first made in the 1800's though.
Or are they just blaming a certain brand?
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Careful! Cancer was around before cigarettes or dioxin. Not that I don't think RFK is full of shit, but sometimes it's best to ignore bad arguments when there are so many good ones to be made.
Just because something already exists, doesn't mean it can't be also caused by something else. Like canser. It already exists. But smoking can cause it too.
Next to that, it's paracetamol. It predates the discovery/naming of autism. It's already proven not to be the cause by other studies. Of course these studies could have been wrong, but I highly doubt that.
So this statement is incorrect. Doesn't change the fact that I don't believe a word of either Trump or RFK. I still believe science and I still don't believe pseudoscience.
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Listen I know the RFK claim is nonsense but that doesn't excuse faulty logic. This is like saying cancer existed before X so X can't be a carcinogen.
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Til autism was once understood as being the same as schizophrenia.
Quite interesting how the concept of neurodivergence is almost doing the opposite with respect to individuals who overlap on multiple neurological labels. Except it celebrates the individual uniqueness of their mind, needs, strenghts and challenges rather then generalising to find the one pill to sell to all.
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There's a 100% correlation between a child coming into direct physical contact with their family doctor and that same child later being diagnosed with autism. Show me an example where this was not the case. Family doctors are sporing autismomes like a tickled mushroom and no one is talking about it.
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puts on logic glasses
Oh look, another brilliant mind discovered that autism was identified before Tylenol existed, so obviously Tylenol can't cause autism. That's like saying cancer existed before radiation therapy, therefore radiation can't cause cancer. Peak necessity/sufficiency confusion right here - apparently conditions can only have one cause and medical recognition equals temporal origin.
But hey, let's ignore that Swedish study of 2.5 million kids that found zero causal link when they actually controlled for confounding variables using sibling comparisons. Or those other high-quality studies that show the association completely disappears once you account for genetics and family environment. Who needs actual science when you have timeline gotchas?
Meanwhile pregnant women might avoid the safest pain reliever available because some politician decided to manufacture outrage for political points. But at least someone gets to feel intellectually superior about their logical fallacy meme.
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I only buy generic brand medications, so my kids are at risk of generic brand autism. Is this going to be a signifier of a low income upbringing when they reach adulthood?
Should I switch to name brand Tylenol for their future?
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it's a bad argument, but the people claiming that Tylenol causes autism aren't using logic to make their claim either.
Tylenol is just a paracetamol brand name in the US. TIL
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That settles it, then. Obviously, autism was caused by time travel.
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Not to defend RFK, but this argument is dumb.
People from everywhere it doesn't natively grow developed cancer long before they had access to tobacco. That doesn't prove tobacco use doesn't cause cancer, it just means it isn't the only potential cause.
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https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2817406
Findings In this population-based study, models without sibling controls identified marginally increased risks of autism and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) associated with acetaminophen use during pregnancy. However, analyses of matched full sibling pairs found no evidence of increased risk of autism (hazard ratio, 0.98), ADHD (hazard ratio, 0.98), or intellectual disability (hazard ratio, 1.01) associated with acetaminophen use.
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