Need paracetamol - but feel guilty

[jillyjollyjojo]

Am on my third day of nasty cold/flu type thing. Felt so rough last night took paracetamol. Doc said ok to do so in pg. Feeling really shit and need to go to shops... just can't bring myself to take it as feel guilty. (22 wks)

it is safe to take, don't feel guilt

Why do you feel guilty? It's fine to take paracetamol in preg..really just take it and hopefully feel a bit better!

Yep, doesn't cross the placenta so has absolutely zero effect on the baby.

Take the paracetamol-don't feel guilty!

www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2566835/Taking-paracetamol-pregnancy-raise-risk-child-developing-ADHD.html

:(

or, lets ignore daily mail

www.theguardian.com/society/2014/feb/26/adhd-linked-paracetamol-during-pregnancy-study

The daily mail will cause more harm to your baby with its fear mongering than one paracetamol

However, if you will worry more by taking it - perhaps lemon and honey? Saline nose rinse to kill off cold? Garlic water? There must be other relatively harmless natural remedies. Oh onion slice in your ear kills ear pain swiftly too.

I have been taking it, and co-codamol, almost constantly for pre existing back pain and now unbearable rib pain at 40 weeks. really don't feel bad, it's totally safe.

Is this your first pregnancy OP? I think we all recognise the guilt, but ignore that one (only one) study.

I took co-codamol in pregnancy for the odd headache. Some women need large amounts of cocodamol (or stronger) for pregnancy-related conditions like SPD. Our mothers/grandmothers smoked, drank, ate and took everything. I know my mum regularly took a morphine derivative of some description for migraines.

It's fine. Take your paracetamol and I hope you feel better soon.

Paracetamol is fine to take. I had awful back pain in my first trimester and went to two different pharmacists to check - both said that it's safe to take in pregnancy.

To be honest, if I had a bad cold at 22 weeks I'd probably sod it and have a hot toddy!

Paracetamol is absolutely fine. In fact lots of medications are under certain supervision.

I am having a CS under a GA and due to a back condition cannot have any form of numbing in my spine. I will be given morphine and despite planning to breastfeed have been told this is fine.

There are guidelines for a reason, so always check with your midwife or GP if unsure, but paracetamol is definitely ok

Absolutely 100% safe. Will do NOTHING bad.

There are actually many women pregnant on meds - if advised by a doctor they are of low risk. It might seem no one takes anything but it's just not true.
So long as a dr has checked it's safe, it should be ok.

...and don't believe the marketing shtick that the Guardian is utterly unbiased and insensational. .. They love a good "medical scare" story.
If this study was conclusive doctors would discuss and implement it by now.

My SIL is a GP and she told me paracetamol is fine.

Please take paracetamol for your cough/ cold. I had a bad cough for 10 days and didn't take any - just tried hot lemon and all the Halls/ Soothers etc... ended up in A&E on Tuesday as the cough had coughed me to have increased venal pressure in brain. I had CT scan and they were considering a lumbar puncture. Really, get rid of it with perfectly safe medication! I'm now on paracetamol AND codeine!

Ignore the scare stories, there are ten a week. Honestly, paracetamol's safe. And it's not like you're talking about taking them daily - you're taking a couple, a couple of times.

To help reassure you, here are the problems with the facts in that story(from the info in the Guardian story):

1. The study's findings are correlational, not causal. They say this in the last four paragraphs of the article. That means they don't know whether the paracetamol directly causes the increased risk of ADHD, or whether women who take paracetamol during pregnancy also do something else that increase the child's risk of ADHD. Maybe looking at a screen all day is the real risk [I am making this up, obvs, it's not] and because women who look at screens all day tend to get headaches, they take more paracetamol, so it would be true to say that women who take paracetamol have a higher risk, but not true that that the higher risk is caused by the paracetamol.

The study did not connect paracetamol itself with the risk of ADHD.

1. It's the early findings of just one study. 'More studies are needed to confirm the findings, but experts said the research points to a new potential cause for the worldwide rise in cases of ADHD'. Note words 'points to', and 'potential'. No-one knows yet. It's just that the paper wants to make an interestingly scary story, so they've glossed over these facts.

1. 'More than half' of 64,000 pregnant women said they took paracetamol, and the vast majority of those did not have a child with ADHD. If there was a link as direct as 'take paracetamol, give your baby ADHD', then surely more kids would be diagnosed. If there is a link, it's going to be very complex.

1. The article expresses the risk increase as a 'relative risk increase', ('a 37% higher risk of having a child who would be later given a hospital diagnosis of hyperkinetic disorder'), which is the biggest and scariest way of reporting a risk increase. If the disorder you're looking at is already really quite rare, like 5% of US children being diagnosed with ADHD (in fact in the UK it's 2.4%, but they've used the higher American figure in the article, because it's scarier), then a relative risk increase of 37% still means you've got a really slim chance of having a child with ADHD, even if there is a direct link between paracetamol and ADHD, and you've taken lots of paracetamol.

Sorry to be an uber-geek, but these stories get right up my nose because the papers make them big and scary, and people end up feeling guilty and worried over something that's absolutely fine.

Hope you feel better soon!

I had a bad cold in my first 12 weeks. Relented and didn't take anything as like you felt guilty but as a result it spread to my sinuses and I got a bad infection which ended up in me taking parecetamol and antibiotics.
My advice is to take some. Don't go made just if you really need it.
You suffering will harm the baby potentially a lot more than a few parecetamol.
Oh and rest ( if u can) x

Thanks all. Took some about hour and a half ago as really had to get to shops. Still feel like shite so goodness knows what I would feel like without it. Oh, and got lots of cake in... thats good for pain relief isn't :D

it's fine.
you not getting any sleep because of illness might be more harmful than takng it as a once off.

Q - Why are there no painkillers in the jungle?

A - Because the paracetamol (parrots eat em all)

Sorry