Your Therapist Needs Therapy 116 - Tylenol Does Not Cause Autism

Because, obviously, right? JFC, what is even happening. 

But f’real, in this episode, Jeremy dismantles the Trump administration’s claim that Tylenol causes autism, explaining how the argument relies on bad science, a misuse of correlation, and misogynistic political agendas. He highlights how the ban is another act of political violence against women, restricting safe and necessary medication during pregnancy while feeding into the broader Christian nationalist project of control. The episode ends with Jeremy reminding listeners to manage stress, find joy, and lean on community as ways to survive in a time of fascism and systemic harm.

As always, Jeremy has all his practice info at Wellness with Jer, and you can find him on Instagram and YouTube. To show your love for the show you can pick up some merch! We appreciate support from likes, follows, and shares as well! None of my online work would be possible without my media maven Kenny, so check out their work as well at kenlingdesign.com

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Podcasts about therapy do not replace actual therapy, and listening to a podcast about therapy does not signify a therapeutic relationship.

If you or someone you know is in crisis please call or text the nationwide crisis line at 988, or text HELLO to 741741. The Trevor Project has a crisis line for LGBTQ+ young people that can be reached by texting 678678.

Transcript

Transcript

Jeremy Schumacher: Welcome to another edition of Your Therapist Needs Therapy because what in the actual f*** is going on in the world today? I'm your host Jeremy Schumacher, licensed marriage family therapist. I do have a therapist. She's lovely. back with another solo episode where I talk about politics because I am a little more fiery than some people maybe publicly want to be. And also we had talk about all this stupid s*** that affects our mental health because fascism is bad for health and wellness in spite of what the make America healthy again. Can we just call it a pilgrim yet? can we call it I don't know how to say that word out loud.

Jeremy Schumacher: It's a word I read all the time. let's talk about how autism is not caused by Tylenol. Just underline that six times and highlight it and tell all your pregnant friends and anybody who might have a child in the future that it is perfectly fine and healthy to not only take Tylenol, but also generic acetaminophen.  That might be a hard word for some people to He said pretty sarcastically. The Trump administration, Donald Trump and after RFK several months ago said we'd have a cure for autism in September, which isn't how science works, I have written and been published in reviewed journals.

Jeremy Schumacher: and you get published when the study's done, which is not always under your control cuz science is weird and unexpected things happen. So, we knew this was never going to be legitimate because you don't announce months ahead that you're going to make a big announcement, especially for something as complex as neurode divergence. so, yeah, this was always going to be illegitimate.  I think there were some whispers and there was some early leaks because this is the leakiest White House of all time on Tylenol was going to be the thing they backed off some of the antivax talking points because they're pretty unpopular and they've been roundly disproven. and they landed on Tylenol through the same flawed science that got them to being antivax.

Jeremy Schumacher: which is just a basic misunderstanding about correlation and causation and that correlation does not equal causation and that good science works to establish causation. And this was never ever again what they were interested in. we'll get into that. But acetaminophen is overwhelmingly prescribed. It's safe to take over the counter. Again, follow the rules that are on the bottle. you can harm your liver and do some kidney damage by overdoing it for so again with all medications there's some risks at play here but that's well above and beyond what is prescribed.

Jeremy Schumacher: and we see again a basic misunderstanding of correlation and causation but also a basic misunderstanding of statistics because one of the reasons Tylenol and acettophin in general I'm going to keep saying Tylenol cuz Trump kept saying Tylenol he literally had to walk back to the podium and correct it to say Tylenol is a seed amount  So everything I just said also counts for that. he couldn't say acetaminophen because very famously he is not good at reading because he's a moron and has been for his entire life. so he didn't want to say he had benefit because he know how and he's can't read it. So he just kept saying ol. There's no way Tylenol doesn't come back and sue them.

Jeremy Schumacher: hopefully just into being I don't know. It's not even like their money. So, I don't know what I hope they sue them for. and how dare this administration be so inept that I have sided recently with a take Tucker Carlson shared and now I'm siding with big pharma. it's awful.  They're so bad that I'm joining my enemies because there's the much worse enemy. yeah, so they came out with their pre-planned Wrestlemania style announcement. Again, this is a distraction for me to talk about how Trump is in the WWE Hall of Fame, but it is very est Carney sort of showman. Let's they had posters. They become a little bit of a meme, which I don't love.

00:05:00

Jeremy Schumacher: I don't think we should memeify Trump or RFK because I think it diminishes how much active damage is being done right now to make it an online joke right away. But also the memes were kind of funny just because I saw them in a lot of wrestling communities and a lot of the neurody divergent folks I know have loved to have the photograph up for whenever my hyperfocus is mentioned in announcement. which is funny. We can memeify it hopefully when they're both no longer doing harm, which at this rate is probably when they're dead because the Senate didn't overturn RFK in his appointment, even though they definitely should have. So, who the** knows? Maybe Tylenol will be their downfall in suing them, not because it causes harm.

Jeremy Schumacher: so Tylenol and acetamophen are one of the few drugs that pregnant women can take while they are pregnant. It on the baby's brain development. Has very little to no impact as far as side effects go for the women themselves with birthing people themselves. And so it's a safe drug in a way that things like ibuprofen and some other drugs are not while you are pregnant.  And this is a larger act of political violence against women. This is a continuation of political violence against women by this administration. Taking away right to reproductive health through banning abortion. working currently tirelessly to ban birth control and now taking away a basic pain reliever.

Jeremy Schumacher: And again, I've heard things about how I think RFK and Dr. Oz have talked about how this can damage the baby and just for a slight fever. we're just giving them acettophen for a slight fever. One of the things we do know about in uterero development and babies who are not born yet and how their brains develop is that the mom being sick can be detrimental to that baby's health and their development.  And even a slight fever can have pretty negative outcomes. Let alone a high fever for several days can be very detrimental to that baby's health. And even if that baby is born healthy, whatever that means, that baby is born, the birth delivery process goes smoothly, that a mom who is sick for a long time during pregnancy, that illness that was attacking the mom's body also attacks the baby's body.

Jeremy Schumacher: And so we know that something like an untreated high fever can have negative outcomes for a developing baby's brain and body. And so what is far more dangerous is an untreated fever than whatever risks they're trying to talk about et. Again, there aren't any if you take it as prescribed, let alone if you're doing the the-counter as prescribed on the bottle. it's such a safe drug that you don't need a prescription for so whatever risks they're trying to highlight there are so minimal versus a very obvious wellestablished over decades and decades of good established science that an untreated fever can do harm. And we saw this with COVID, The number of people Aaron Rogers, Joe Rogan, the idiots around the world who are like the vaccine can harm your heart.

Jeremy Schumacher: general misunderstanding of how statistics work to say that is a minute possibility for a tiny subset of the population. which is the thing that is true for vaccines Again, drugs everywhere. medications of all kinds and we tracked that. There was reporting.  So why you had that little questionnaire after you got the vaccine on if you had any adverse effects or the next couple of days like crack that Vaccine injury doesn't mean vaccines always cause injury. It means some small subset of the population will have a negative reaction and we should track those things. We should continue the science to learn and understand why that happens and what's different about that subset of the population so we can make a safe vaccine for them too, right?

Jeremy Schumacher: but overwhelmingly more dangerous, more harmful for people's hearts was getting CO. I worked with an all-American sprinter who got COVID and could not pass their EKG to return to practice, let alone compete in the sport that they were incredibly talented in. This was somebody who was a highly healthy person, a high functioning previous stuff.  It wasn't. They got sick before vaccines were even available and they couldn't return to their sport. getting COVID overwhelmingly was more dangerous than anything the vaccine had. And so we saw this talking point get trotted out during that. the antivax crowd has gotten this wrong over and over and over again. And look, I get it. Not everybody likes math and a lot of people don't like math because they're not good at it. I'm not here to shame people about academics.

00:10:00

Jeremy Schumacher: as somebody who didn't struggle in school, I'm not throwing shade if this was a struggle for you. I couldn't understand organic chemistry no matter how hard I tried. OKM2 was the end of my premed journey. so there's just stuff that our brain doesn't get or understand or it's a lot of work and effort. But statistics for a lot of folks is not one of those things.  There are people who really excel at statistics. And I was one of those people who got good grades in my statistics and research methods classes. Again, I'm not bragging. I'm just establishing some evidence, a long, long track record of being good at math and understanding basic principles of highle statistics. A lot of people are bad at those things.

Jeremy Schumacher: and RFK, the antivax crowd definitely bad at those things. Again, highlighting minute risks while ignoring the far larger risks because we have a basic misunderstanding of how percentages work. If we have a basic misunderstanding of how statistics impact risk assessment, but again, I'm not sold that I think he's a believer in the antivax movement.  I think he was probably pushed to the side here and Tylenol was the chosen thing because that correlation is there. I think they wanted to back off on the antivax stuff because it was so apparent they would do a lot of harm and also get sued. And I think it's been so roundly debunked. But Tylenol is the same issues that we've used to debunk the false claims of the antivax crowd, which again starts with correlation does not equal causation.

Jeremy Schumacher: but a lot of pregnant folks have used Tylenol because again it is safe to use while you were pregnant. So they made the same exact mistake with correlation and picked it there. Now it has certainly come to light, I've seen it posted over and over again that the drug that they talked about as a cure to take in place in conjunction with a Tylenol or acettophen routine is one that Oz is a pretty big stakeholder in.  Dr. Oz who is also a moron, but at least has medical training. He has abandoned most of the teachings and tenants of that medical training, but hey, at least at some point his brain did at least be exposed to this information. and he did practice medicine for a while before, going to the wellness grift because Oprah made him famous. I don't know that he's still a doctor.

Jeremy Schumacher: but he's head of CMS now and again that's an appointment that he should have never been approved for. But here we are. pretty blatant eruption which again this administration has gone full mask off on the corruption piece. U they're full mask off on white supremacy. They're full mask off on hating women. that is a full mask off on a lot of things.  But the United States government has been corrupt for a long long time, Politicians are corrupt. the state as an entity has been corrupt again before chips came out and propaganda like law and order normalized a lot of this stuff. cops were hated universally and also known to be just blatantly corrupt. and we still know this stuff. We know state actors are blatantly corrupt. We know politicians are corrupt.

Jeremy Schumacher: Citizens United tried to legalize some of it. There's a court case that came across the Supreme Court a few years ago where they basically said s aren't bribes if they happen later. And so, as long as you wait three years or three months on your bribery, then it isn't a quidd proquo because again, Clarence Thomas is getting fancy RVs. It's a simple guy. He hates his wife and other black people and also likes his RVs. so you know what a stupid timeline to be in. but yeah, it's just blatant corruption.  Previous presidents, while still probably being corrupt in ways that were not so publicly obvious, did try and go through with the illusion of releasing stake they had in companies, getting rid of property, not being in charge of companies that would stand to gain. Trump again didn't do much of that in 2016.

Jeremy Schumacher: he quote unquote stepped down from running his Trump organization, but he put his sons in charge and then he put his sons in government roles. So again, the grift has been very very good for the coffers of the Trump family. and it's just been Corruption in a way that would not have lied anywhere else throughout history. except for overt oligarchs and regimes that we would write in our American history books as being corrupt.  So, this is more of that. but it's also, I think, understanding some of the eugenics that RFK dabbles in. and understanding that Christian nationalism hates women. for anybody who spent any sort of time in a fundamentalist religion, a high control evangelical setting, like women are secondass citizens and always have been.

00:15:00

Jeremy Schumacher: They are to be submissive to the men in their lives. Men are the head of the household. men get the leadership roles. I grew up fundamentalist and in my church, women were not allowed to vote in church meetings. Their husbands got to vote for them. No mention of single women. They were not important enough to have in our bylaws. and women couldn't be pastors. Go can you imagine? But definitely couldn't be ushers because even having somebody who says it's time to get up and leave or it's time to get up and go to communion is technically having authority over a man, which cannot happen. and so again, if you're at all familiar with the Christian nationalist grift here, and that movement into politics, that power grab that the new apostolic reform has, they hate women.

Jeremy Schumacher: they think they're secondass citizens. They want to quote unquote protect women as the weaker sex. which is grossly misogynistic and also not based on anything because we know how often women are harmed in these settings with no accountability for the men. So yeah, this is a combination of Donald Trump and RK hate women.  Trump raped his first wife, raped Eugene Carol, raped a bunch of children. allegedly, and we can say definitively on the first two. I feel good on legal grounds for those first two because those have been and allegedly, raped a bunch of children. and other people like serial sexual assaulter and somebody who's bragged about it. And he despises women.

Jeremy Schumacher: We know this by the actions he's had throughout his life. RFK also despises women. I've talked about RFK before, so I'm not going to do the whole deep dive, but he basically harassed his ex-wife into killing herself because he hates women. he cheated on her often and he kept a diary about it. He was awful to a lot of the women in his life. So, we have these two bad actors who we know hate women.  But zooming out to see the misogyny inherent in this entire movement. And we can also say Steven Miller hates women. he's just like an outright Again, he quoted Gable or he's quoting actual Nazi speeches from people word for word and we're were just left to ignore that. I don't know. He literally hit a Gable speech at the Charlie Kirk ceremony.

Jeremy Schumacher: wild times that anybody who was like, "How did Germany allow Nazis to rise to power?" we're just living through a lot of people hated it and spoke up and it didn't seem to matter because our institutions have failed us. so we have the Christian right that has become the political that is married to the political right at this point also hates women.  And so women in pain and not letting them be treated for that pain. Women in quote unquote just slight discomfort according to all the men who have not pushed a human being out of their birth canal. can say s*** like that cuz they hate women. And that's a church standing among the evangelicals. So that's not of surprise. And that's Donald Trump and RFK's whole life. So this is women in pain is a good thing for them.

Jeremy Schumacher: the Bible says that childbirth should be painful. That was one of the costs of Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit back in Genesis. So, again, this is well established in the religious community that women should be in pain. They're going to come after birth control. they're going to keep doing that. They're probably going to also come after epidurals. Anything that could make women more comfortable or allow women to have more autonomy over their own bodies, they're going to keep attacking. and so there's that piece of it and then there's also the ability to blame women for causing autism, this is more hatred and violence against women because it is their choice to take this medication which had this negative outcome. neurode divergence is not just a biological difference that is genetic and that is something that has been there throughout history. Now it is a choice and again this is easily disproven.

00:20:00

Jeremy Schumacher: know it's not a choice. We know it's predominantly genetic. There are some environmental factors around health and age of parents, not just moms, but both parents. but there's a strong genetic component and there are a few environmental factors that seem to have not a direct causal correlation, but things to look into more. we don't have a full understanding on why it might show up in some ways and not others, but we know Tylenol is not that thing. one because autism has been diagnosed since the early 1900s. and Tylenol wasn't a thing till 1950. That's the easiest way to poke holes in this brilliant analysis this brilliant administration has put out.

Jeremy Schumacher: But beyond that, I think there's just the idea that better research has been done. How the administration came here is they found a quack who wrote a paper. And I love how they're a Harvard study. this is not a study that Harvard put out. This is a study that a guy who worked for a bit at Harvard as a professor put out, but they're very for credentials and fancy colleges when it is for their benefit. Again, fascists do not need to be internally consistent.  So, while they continue to attack education and specifically higher education, they will tout, look, this came from the big fancy smart school, even though that's not true, but when it serves their purpose, they're going to do that. basically did a meta study, which is sort of a way where you gather a lot of studies that have been done before. I'm going to say you scrape some data. there's ways to do meta- studies that are really good and there's ways to do studies that are really bad. This was the latter. This is a really bad meta study.

Jeremy Schumacher: But beyond just not being a way to establish correlation to establish causation because you cannot use a meta study for that, you're just grabbing a bunch of data and you can find correlation for sure there. You have all these data points, but you're going to have correlation for a bunch of unrelated things because you're not able to get causation. And so they took that and then they cut a bunch of the data that didn't match this.  So you can look at what studies they talk about and which ones they said didn't meet our criteria and they cut all the studies that would have disagreed with them. So there's a really good study out of Sweden in 2024 that 30 years worth of much better data set that they had.

Jeremy Schumacher: they compared genetic siblings and there's no correlation or there's the correlation disappears but definitely no causation around acettomenophen and autism and so again this has been dismissed as of definitively last year again there are things to study around acetaminophen use with pregnancy to keep women and children healthy but a ban is not about health and wellness this  is trying to play to the antivax crowd. And as far as I know, I mean, I've not seen I continue to see zero groups who voted for these people actually hold them accountability, but the antivax crowd is unhappy with this because they wanted RFK to come out and say it's vaccines and he did not do that.

Jeremy Schumacher: Trump talked around it a little bit, but in that sort of rambly old man who has dementia and was never very smart to begin with sort of way, which never really means much. But I suppose you could cherrypick. He does talk about vaccines and he does talk about how we should space them out. That isn't in the study that they highlighted and there's not anything.  if you read the actual study and the actual press release, which I did not read it cover to cover, but I've talked to a lot of people who are medical doctors or obser because again, when you're somebody who's in academia and you're somebody who likes learning, you do find people who are smarter than which is lovely. It's great to learn from those people.

Jeremy Schumacher: so it's been shown to me in the actual DHS release where they say there are studies that contradict this again they're trying to do the play to their base but also cover their ass because they know they're wrong and this is not at all about science.  And so the politics of harming women is a big win for the right and all the people who wanted to vote for them because of abortion like this is what we all warned you about that that people still I think don't want to take seriously that this administration hates women and always has.

00:25:00

Jeremy Schumacher: And so for the white evangelical women out there who voted for Trump three times, I don't know, that's on you it's not white evangelical men more. that's the largest voting block that voted for Trump three times, but lots of white women who thought this wouldn't come back and haunt them. sorry, it always was going to and you were warned. and this is all part of project 2025, this is tearing down institutions that have worked against the religious right and the conservative movement. The continuing attack of that people are going to die because of this people, because of course they are because RFK's policies always have led to people dying because he doesn't know what he's doing. He is a lawyer and he approached this as a lawyer would which is start with a premise. My client is not guilty.

Jeremy Schumacher: build your argument to meet that premise and that's not how science works at all. So we knew that that couldn't happen with this announcement several months early. it surprises me in zero ways that the same research and statistic flaws exist. It surprised me in zero ways that it's just another way to harm women. America as a country has a really bad infant mortality rate.  We have some states that have horrific infant mortality rates. Mississippi's declared a state of emergency because the abortion ban has already been such a detriment to babies and birthing people's health that a state of emergency was declared and the Trump administration responded that by saying stop tracking this data. So again it's just authoritarianism. it is truly well and truly fascism. This isn't just calling people Nazis because you want to insult them.

Jeremy Schumacher: this is what the Nazis did too. you can't put Nazi Steven Miller in charge of things and not expect to have Nazi species spoken word for word, but also policies that will specifically enact political violence, do harm, cause death to marginalized communities, women and especially women of black and brown women. this is designed to be mostly harmful to especially women coming from marginalized communities and people in the poor community. this is designed to make their lives worse. And again, there's not a ton of push back in the ballot box because Again, the people one of us are people who Trump would never spend any time with because he hates poor people. He's never been

Jeremy Schumacher: never been one of us. It's born into extreme wealth for attacking marginalized communities.  again, the Trump money comes from Trump's dad putting people in bad contracts that he can then force them to go bankrupt and kick them out and just keep repeating that cycle so he makes a s*** ton of money off of the same piece of real estate through predatory loans and other illegal behaviors like the Trump family's been going in front of grand juries since the 70s and none of this was unknown when he ran in 2016. So project 2025 was always the plan.

Jeremy Schumacher: we have a politician who's gone on record recently to say that out loud. This was always the plan. It's always been project 202 Of course, the media continues to be distressingly stupid about all of this. I cannot fathom. and again, this is coming from somebody who's so far left as to not have a political party here. in college, I was reading about how five corporations owned most of the media. this is coming from somebody who's been skeptical of media for a lot longer than Trump came out and said you can't trust the fake news. I'm still baffled by how badly the media continues to fumble Donald Trump on a daily basis. so there's been some push back in the media I think around this.

Jeremy Schumacher: this wasn't some big victory lap that the administration gets to take. They will again continue to tout it, but this is going to do harm and then it's going to be onto the next big sensationalized thing that can hold the attention span of the headlines for a bit. this went poorly and will cause enough doubt for people who just heard the headline or just caught the little bit of it to think that they shouldn't do that or they should ignore their fever or they should not talk to their doctor because their doctor is some sort of ideologue instead of somebody who's trained to do this. they're listening to the ideologues and stupid ones at that.

00:30:00

Jeremy Schumacher: So, incredibly frustrating. the eugenics of RFK, I've talked about you can listen to the episode on abbleism, but I've had some people in my circles in therapy circles and mental health circles when I said RFK is a eugenicist to be that seems a little strong. It's if you listen to the words he said and look at read a transcript of something that RFK puts out, he wants people to get sick because he thinks people who aren't healthy enough to survive should die.  He thinks if you are healthy enough, you will never have a disability. And That's not how any biology works for any living organism. You will always have genetic difference in any grouping because's how genetics That's how biology works. The world's life as we experience it on this planet is incredibly complex and therefore messy.

Jeremy Schumacher: You cannot exercise and eat right and prevent differences in genetics and some of those differences lead to what we classify as disabilities. and he's just a eugenicist. He wants those people to die. He thinks they should. Again, RFK, I've talked about this before, is pretty clearly neurode divergent. Never got that diagnosis.  And again, because he's born with not even on, a platinum spoon, whatever is worth a lot more than silver, he's never had to face any consequences for it. Mr. I wasn't very good at school till I started doing heroin and then my grades got better. thinks he's not AD Come on, Also just roided out of his mind. This also came to my awareness recently that not everybody knows RFK is just taking copious amounts of steroids. Dude used to be like skinny.

Jeremy Schumacher: he had a thin slender build and then he got on gear which is a colloquialism for steroids that pro wrestlers use and again I can say this stuff really confidently cuz pro wrestlers use steroids and pro wrestling fans have debated about it forever because people Hulk Hogan said he didn't do steroids until he was under oath and threat of perjury when Vince McMahon was being sued for giving all his wrestlers steroids  Like this is well wellestablished stuff. So again, somebody who's actively on a steroid regimen going out and saying women should just toughen up and deal with it is I don't know what beyond the pale is not even like a fair idiom anymore. we need new language to explain how crazym and legitimately stupifying some of these things are.

Jeremy Schumacher: but yeah, this is poor people This is marginalized communities should die. we'll get rid of autism by letting them die out before they're born or during childbirth versus any any understanding of how research and science works. Any sort of empathy towards people can be different. We don't need everybody to be born into a wealthy family. That's not the only people who have value. so, the Canadian health department, the Canadian counterpart to what would be our health and human services came out and said acceto is safe to take while you're pregnant. Please don't listen to this. This is wrong.

Jeremy Schumacher: and health agencies in the UK and Europe at large have also come out definitively saying this is bad information. So continue to consult with your trained doctors, preferably an OB when it comes to pregnancy. and we're going to have to learn how to find good information because this administration has no problem deleting information, changing things, and just outright lying about it because they continue to not see consequences for that. So again, hopefully whoever owns the name brand Tylenol sues them and that's some consequence. Might be the purse strings that are a consequence of that matter.

Jeremy Schumacher: But again, I don't know, it's coming out of our tax dollars. It's a grift across the board. So really stupid. definitively, it is safe to take acetamophen. It is far more risky to have an untreated fever or illness of some sort while you are pregnant than it is to take acetamophen.  Talk to your doctor. Take cassetto has Follow the directions on the pill bottle. But this is a safe drug and this is far more risk. And these proclamations and these political plays that are based in bad science and based in a desire to do harm to marginalized communities will do that. They will harm people. It's dangerous stuff and very very stupid.

00:35:00

Jeremy Schumacher: So yeah, I can say with certainty, Tylenol does not cause autism. I don't even talk about this s*** in my own therapy.  And I tell other people to do their grounding and connect to their community and that's how you get through fascism is finding joy in small ways and it's stress management. So, it's sort of like how you doing with the world on fire? Yep. Here's I'm doing the things I'm supposed to do to manage it and it's still exhausting and incredibly frustrating. So, do the grounding stuff. Take care of your yourself.

Jeremy Schumacher: I don't know that protecting your peace is even an option at this point. I think if you have some critical thinking skills and a functioning brain, this is a very frustrating time to live through. So, you're going to be frustrated management on that and then find your joy. Connect to your community. As I like to say, take care of somebody else. All right, that's what I got for this week. We'll be back next week with another new episode and some real cool people coming up soon for guests.  So tune in then. Peace.

Meeting ended after 00:36:48 👋

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