The Adam and Dr. Drew Show - #2039 - Tylenol Causes Autism?

Episode Date: September 24, 2025

Adam and Dr. Drew discuss the Trump administration's claim that pregnant women who take Tylenol face a higher risk of having a child with autism, and they share their candid thoughts on the issue.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Recorded live at Corolla 1 Studios with Adam Carolla and board certified physician and addiction medicine specialist, Dr. Drew Pinsky. You're listening to The Adam and Dr. Drew's show. Yeah, get it on. Got to get on the show. We got to get on, Dr. Drew's board for it's in. This is a specialist. Wow. All right, Drew.

You almost said it there. It's crazy. Hot off the press is all the Tylenol talk. Yes, Tylenol. Tylenol and autism. So what did you take away from that? Because I have my own sort of take on it. I listened to both sides.

It's always funny that the left just will dive in. You know, if Trump said, listen, we've linked stream water to autism. They'd go, you did it's got nothing to do. You got to drink more stream water. You know, nobody's going to, it's like it's weird what they fight. They fight everything. Everything. All right. But I learned that, I mean, that was the Ivermectin thing. Like everyone should have just went, I don't know, talk to your doctor. I'm not a pharmacist. Maybe it works. Maybe it doesn't. Maybe it works for some people, not with others. Yes. But no, it's horse pace. Joe Rogan and stuff. That's when I realized, okay, you guys are nuts. And by the way, here's what you did to your brand. When Rolling Stone comes out with their hot take on Tylenol and autism, guess who's not listening? Right.

Everybody. Right. Because you guys lie about everything and you never stopped. Yes. So my plan, my thing in general is putting extra things in your bodies probably should be prevented. Correct. Especially when there is a very delicate system growing inside. Right.

Where the chromatin is open. That can be errors in the replication process. Also, it makes sense to me. to me that if we had, you know, 12 vaccinations 30 years ago, now we have 87 that maybe this has become a cottage industry. Also, I am willing to have my mind open between pharmaceutical companies and profit and not putting the American citizen first. Yes. As I told you, 200 billion years ago, Drew,

physician. What did you tell me? Where I was wrong again. Oh, you remember this. Okay. This is, number berries? This is 25 plus years ago.

You were talking about patients of years that had opioid addiction, and you would tell me some of them took 80 hydrochloridone or whatever. Vicodin. Vicarant. 80 a day. Yes, yes.

That's a fact. This is over 25 years ago. And then I said, well, that sounds like pretty good business for the pharmacy and for the pharmaceutical companies. And you said, oh, no, no, no, no, no. And I said, well, why not? You sell this product and there's people eat and eat. By the way, I'm not going to make you rich consuming this product because I average three of those painkillers every four years. I mean, you know, you get dental surgery or whatever.

You get a prescription. I, by the way, I have vices. That's not one of them. But I'm saying that company that makes that would go out of business if I were their customer. Yeah. Okay. So then I said you at the time, look, whether you're selling hot dogs, if everyone goes vegan, you ain't making money. You hope there's people eating 80 hot dogs a day and you make money.

And then you said, no, they would never do that. They would never think that way. And I said, why not? I don't get it. That's their business. They're moving more product. And then later on, they got accused of all this stuff. They got accused of.

So, okay, so hold on. Let me finish. If you want me to think that pharmaceutical companies can't do things that are somewhere between disreputable and evil in order, I just went through it with COVID. Yes. And with the opioids. And the opioids. So I'm not buying that premise.

Yes. Now, it doesn't mean that can't provide something and make a profit and everyone benefits from it. That's on the table. But this sounds like we're going down that road with all the vaccinations, number one. Then when it comes to the title, yes, these guys, also the autism thing, when it goes from, you know, one in every 5,000, one in 26 or something. Yes, it's a good time to examine what that is. Now, also, I also don't buy into this whole spectrum BS because we opened up the door and the definition of everything. And now everyone's on the spectrum of everything all the time.

And we convinced all the kids they're on. I talked to my son about this when he was in high school. He told me almost every kid he knows says they're on the spectrum of something. And I said, we ruined them. We made them believe that. So I don't know how many people are actually autistic. versus 25 years ago? So you're saying that issue of we're identifying it more frequently has a significant

impact on the data? It has to, and that's what we're doing. I agree. Look, so that's one issue. Okay, well, let's do this one. Let's go to your favorite subject. Rape. Okay.

One in 1,000 women was raped in 1962. Now it's two out of three women have been raped. in 2025. How's that possible? Well, we change your definition. You have to share the violent crime and rape. No, I'm not going to do that joke. But what I'm, all right, maybe later.

But what I'm saying is, is your boyfriend drunk rolling over on topy in the middle of the night, that is now rape. It didn't used to be counted as rape. Right? Yes. So, thus, we have many more rape victims. Yes.

So if you're going to start getting creative with the counting, then I'm not sure what that's going to do with the data versus you know what I'm saying is is 25 years ago one in 500 women was raped now it's two out of five okay does anyone say we have a rape epidemic and the answer is no because we all know they changed the accounting they were sort of saying that kind of stuff in the you know 15 years ago right but we don't really look at it that way we went oh they changed the definition of what this is it's how they squash young men it's how they're

they right right so how is it really that percentage of people that are autistic or is it just the folks that are on the spectrum so that's an issue is that it is being identified more frequently but most of it is in younger population and you would expect it to be across the lifespan if indeed it was just an identification issue uh-huh okay all right so the maha movement says you know Tylenol and then MSNBC jumps out and says there's another study I tend to believe the Maha guys, all, I listened to them all through COVID. They were right about everything. They got tons of studies.

They crunch tons of stuff. It was mostly based on meta-analysis, which are not the most reliable medical studies, but they said there's a signal. Why not avoid the Tylenol, okay? Which I have been in the position forever. Pregnant women should take nothing. Like you said at the beginning, they should take nothing, period, that's end of story. No, I said everyone should take nothing.

Everyone's not a bad idea, but especially pregnant women. But here's the absolute irony. There's only one medication the American College of Physician allows during pregnancy. Oh, let me write this down. Yeah. Go, Drew. Hydroxychloroquine. What?

The one medication that the American medical physician says is weight. My pharmacist won't prescribe it. Hydroxychloric. It's so inert and so benignish. But Anderson Cooper told me. What? It's crazy. I still think it's a bad idea, by the way.

Anything during pregnancy is a bad idea. But that's the one that is recommended to continue during pregnancy. No, Drew. So what I actually appreciated. was you have to watch that press conference rather carefully because Trump got up there and said, look, these guys are saying they're seeing a signal, they're talking like scientists, they can't say don't take it, don't say it, don't take it. I'm using common sense, don't take it.

There's a signal, why would you take it? And then people jumped into, what about inflammation? Acidamidifin is not an anti-inflammatory. It is not, and I can think of zero conditions. I may be crazy high fevers, but even when there's a number of ways to lower the temperature, you take the risk reward into analysis, and then you might use the acetaminopin. When do you need Tylenol? I don't think you.

And when the fever is over 105, you might want to do it that. It's really to break an extremely high fever. It's not going to, you don't need it for 101? No. Why not? Because it might have a risk with autism. You could use it for 101 if you're not pregnant, but you don't need it. Yeah, look.

I mean, technically it's over 103 for children. I'm thinking you're worried about. the fetus over 104. You know, yes, there are certain temperatures where you, and again, it's not an anti-inflammatory. So it's not about the inflammation. It's about the fever itself and the effect on the fetus. There might be worth the risk in that situation. Well, it's such a weird thing with pregnancy. Let's talk to do their job again. Use common sense. Let's, let's do the job. I mean, women, you know, they're not allowed to eat sushi when they're pregnant, you know, because there's some risk of something they're not allowed to drink. I mean,

there's just everything. So why not just add this to the everything list? Exactly. And by the way, there's all the things on that everything list. If somebody's really sick with something, you're going to risk using that everything list to make the, to save the pregnancy and the mom. I can also tell you from firsthand information and experience as a uninsured, unmotivated, broke person, you can gut out almost anything. like the high fevers and the pain and whatever you can get brain damage from that and you want to be careful not this ambray but the point is that you can cut 106 that was wrong i'm not saying cardiac arrest i'm saying the stuff you run to the pharmacy for that was my point you can ride

this that was my point i've ridden out so many healthy person things you just suck it up i mean you ride it out but they're not saying don't use halenol for your 18 year old male they're not saying They're saying if you're a pregnant woman, common sense. All right. So why the spike in autism? They're looking into it. I was reading some, I'm surprised how much their data there is linking. Here's one of the things I'm surprised by.

I was just sort of casually looking through some of the data. And some of the animal models really link vaccines to brain issues. I was shocked at how many of those models were out there. Okay. How much? I mean, here's. But let me just say, but by the same. same token, I'm also surprised in population studies how little of it we see associated with

vaccine. So I'm not sure what to make of it. You don't want the hepatitis BVACs, right? Let's make your comment first. That's a bigger conversation. Let's get into it. Okay. My comment is the fewer things you can put into your body, the better. And we, you know, antibiotics were a God's gift breakthrough several years ago, and now we're seeing the people who had too many antibiotics. Look, you want to know the healthiest people on the planet, Amish people. You want to know the second healthiest people? People to have an outdoor dog that comes in and sleeps on their bed at night. Like that sort of sunshine and hard work and exposure and all that kind of, the less stuff

you can put into your body, the better it's going to be overall big picture. sorry, and the vaccine schedule of 81 or whatever the hell it is, it sounds like to me exactly what it is, way too much. And I don't know what the schedule is with the Amish kids, but I'm going to go zero. And there are some real questions about the safety of the hepatitis B vaccine. I was around the research. My residency director was very involved with it. And we were developing hepatitis B vaccines for mother to fetus transmission during delivery in China. In the Asian region where they still have a problem, okay? They have an issue where it's not being fully identified the way it should be, chronic hepatitis B, and they have a certain amount of

exposure that needs to be limited. They need to take the hepatitis B vaccine. Day one, if you have chronic B, is when you give it. So I looked around the literature recently trying to figure out how many people with chronic hepatitis B in the United States don't know they have it, okay? If you don't know you have chronic hepatitis B and you have chronic hepatitis B, that is our problem. That's the medical problem. We should be identifying that well before delivery in 100% of cases. And I couldn't get any meaningful data of people who were delivering babies that had hepatitis B that didn't know they had it. Okay?

And essentially all of them were either Ivy drug users or from endemic regions, China, certain parts of Asia. That's it. There's nobody else that has it. And you should be testing. Everybody that comes in from those regions or has a drug history, they should all be tested. It's a simple blood test, no big deal. We do it routinely. So if we're not identifying people with hepatitis B for whom their baby needs the vaccine, that's medical problem. It's a malpractice problem. And I saw a doctor say, oh, we're going to see a spike in liver cancer now. That's what's going to happen. It's like, because we didn't give everybody hepatitis B on day one? No, that's ridiculous. It's also when you hear the studies and the reports and the behind the scenes and the stuff they get FOIA stuff and everything like that. You can hear when the pharmaceutical companies are talking and they're like,

well, we're going to have trouble raising money with this whole maha thing because people not going to want to invest because they're cutting back on the vaccine schedules and stuff. They're a company. They're not just not a company that sells cured meats. They do billions and billions of dollars worldwide worth of stuff. Yes, they're going to fight for their company. And it makes sense. The vaccine schedule to me that sort of give everyone everything before six months of age.

That doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense to me. Spread it out. It makes sense. doing too many of them doesn't it all and you're talking to a guy who just the only thing drew ever said that was smart was no free lunches in nature yes this you're you are messing with nature and there will be downstream sort of unintended consequences side things everything you get involved with stuff and that's oh you know we're the 13 year old is transitioning put them on

blocking agents for their, okay, you don't think there's going to be some issues down the road on hormone blocking agents or whatever. You don't think when you get in and you start messing around with the human body that there's not something down the road. Now, look, there are things that need to be done. You need to have your wisdom tooth pulled because it's impacted. All right, go take it out. You know what I mean?

Best case scenario, you never touch anything. Right. Right. All right. We'll take a quick break. Be right back after this. Bed Online. Hey, it's Adam Carolla from the Adam Carolla show.

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I can find exactly what I need, for my home and more. No matter your space, style, or budget, shopwayfair.com to make your home way more you. Wayfair, every style, every home. All right, so we have Trump in the press conference, so Andrew, Andrew says. My take on this is, it's, I,

I will not call this a breakthrough, true. But what I will do is I will say, why are you arguing with people who are just saying you don't need this? Let's not do it. It's so weird. Right. And that's just arguing. A lot of that's sort of chick-think stuff. You know, I'm the one that just says, it's no different than vaccines for young, I should say the COVID vaccine for the young healthy male. They're going, well what about and I'm like it's unnecessary so let's not do it and then they go it's perfectly safe and I go maybe it is there's plenty of things that are perfectly safe you know I I could get my son a colonoscopy next weekend it's perfectly safe okay it's safe it's unnecessary

by the way it perfectly safe is there's no such thing in yeah because you're going to put him under I did that to I did that for a friend of mine she's a 38-year-old females. Ah, you go to do it, no big deal. They perforated her a colon. She ended up with a colostomy. Right. That's what I'm saying that.

Well, yeah, but the chances of that. Low. Yeah, I know, but my son's 19. He doesn't need a colonoscopy. Exactly. Same thing with the vaccine. The vaccine, there's a zero probability of him being hospitalized with COVID as a young healthy male.

There's a non-zero probability of him getting myocarditis from the vaccine. Right. So that's it. Boom, done. Don't get it. Yeah, but take that math and bring it over to Tylenol. That's all I'm saying. All right, let's listen to Trump.

The research, a lot of what they've been speaking about comes from right here by research done by these people. And I just say it again. Don't take Tylenol. Don't take it. And don't give it to your child after your child is born. And do all those other things, little things, just spread out your visits, et cetera, et cetera, on the vaccine.

And I want to thank everybody. This is a very important day. Thank you very much. All right, the volume's a little low. But this other thing, too, I argue with people about all time. It's like, oh, this guy doesn't always tell him. Where was Joe Biden? Joe Biden was eating a scoop of ice cream on the beach, his entire presidency.

Now, look, you may disagree with whatever Trump said or says. I feel like he's out there trying to do something, though. Trying to help people. Yeah. Yeah. He's not autistic. but he'd like your kid not to be born that way. So whatever, try it.

Let's circle back to the painkiller thing, can we? We're willing to do that? Yeah. Because it's really kind of complicated. You made a point which is valid, which is that the drug companies are going to make most of their money from people to use a lot of their product, right? Yeah. Turns out alcohol companies make a lot of their money from alcoholics.

That's just the case. So that's given. Yeah. I was talking about a particular product. called Vicodin at the time, which at the time was available as a generic, okay? And we were, what I was talking about was that people got over 80 tablets today, which happened not infrequently, would get deafness. And if you remember, that happened to Rush Limbaugh.

He got deafness from excessive use of. Oh, is that what caused that? Yeah. And it was a thing I was seeing a bit of, and it was nasty. What you were talking about with, so the Vicodin was not even manufactured by the drug companies any longer. It was a generic. So it's pennies a pill.

That was made an argument. Oxycontin was what you were talking about, and that was an expensive pill, and that was being overused, and that was popular. But what people missed on that was that the drug companies were not the cause of that. The doctors were. The pain management world created the problem. And, of course, the drug companies blew wind to the sales of those doctors, but it was created by us.

A lot of the stuff that is being created, the COVID stuff, created by us. A lot of it is created by the medical providers. And really, you need to be careful whenever there are evangelical, remember me talking about this? Evangelical physicians like Demer Burks, like the pain management world in the 90s, watch out. They do harm. I agree. Listen, sadly, the COVID thing, you know, between the, you know, all the doctors and I mean, Andrew, that clip some of this stuff has to be revisited just to have your mind melt you know that MSNBC clip with the two black women under the pretense of hair relaxer oh yeah relaxers causing cancer with black women's where they it's a it's a it's a six and a half minute segment

yeah and the title of it does hair relaxer caught link to can with black women who use the product, right? And they have paraffins or something in it. I can't remember what it is. But the whole point is this. The whole thing is bizarre because the woman who's anchoring that story has a natural because share hair is just as it was, Cleopatra Jones style, you know. The doctor who's explaining how dangerous this is clearly dips her head in a bucket

of hair relax every day before she leaves for work. It's already, it's kind of weird. You know what I mean? It'd be like DJ Qualls is going to talk to Arnold Schwarzenegger about the dangers of steroids. And then Schwarzenegger's going to explain there's a danger in steroids, but he's clearly juicing. So it was like a weird combo to get out of the gate. Then after dedicating less than half the segment to hair relaxing, they just, kind of seamlessly get into why you need to have your infant vaccinated for COVID,

which wasn't part of the heading on the things that does this cause cancer. We're not getting it. Then proceeds to spend more time talking about vaccinations in a very bizarre way, as I recall. And then this woman does an insane long soliloquy about how safe and how important it is to get your infants vaccinated. Didn't she say something about all the babies dying from? COVID or some craziness.

It was all bullshit. It was all wrong. And then you're like, is this CDC and the drug companies and whomever and CNN? Is it all just one big cabal? And I guess the answer sort of, yes. It was hysteria. It was an hysteria. It was a mass formation.

But hold on. It was a hysteria where certain people profited greatly. And certain people. who like to, you know, tell other people how to live, consolidated their power and their ability to do that. Right. And then at some point, JAMA and New England, Journal of Health and all those people,

they all got weird and corrupted and woke. That was a shocking to me. And so did all the psychological, you know, publications and stuff. Like, oh, man, I signed at birth. He's a woman. Like, oh, my God, you're all gone. Two things. One is you've got to listen very carefully at RFK Jr.

He said something the other day that really surprised me. He goes, you know what? I don't think we're going to fund research that's published in Lancet, New England Journal, and I forget his third journal. We're just not going to allow them to be published there. And NIH publishes most of the, not just published, they fund most of the important research in this country at some point. And they're saying, we're not going to allow that to be published in the major journals.

That was a big deal. But the other thing is, when you talk about, I was. standing in Washington, D.C. airport in Dulles, when you went, oh, my God, they've got everybody. Remember that? And I was like, that was the funniest thing. And you're just tilting at that again. Say it again more completely. That everybody got into the hysteria. Everybody. Yeah. You got the church involved. Everybody was in it. I'll show you this clip. Now, it's about the halfway point where they start talking about. Just a visual of the woman with Cleopatra Jones's hair and then the other one with Jennifer

Aniston's hair. And the one with Jennifer Anderson's hair is talking about how dangerous hair relaxer is to women of color. Wow. So we're already off to a weird and surreal start. Are we not? Yeah. All right.

Probably about the middle. This is it, I think. Yeah. Oh, this is it. Yeah. But it's the middle. Sorry. Go ahead.

Keep further out. Well, the middle is the middle. You're not at the middle. Yeah. I'm saying the middle. Okay. There's what you're she. When I say the middle, I mean the middle.

We die younger ages. One of the things I've talked about on the show is that my dad is a biologist, but specifically, he was a tumor oncologist. So I like to shorthand it. My dad was looking for the cure for cancer, everybody. That was what his job was for over 25 years. So I just know from him that there are so many different chemicals and so many things, like you said, food and cosmetics, that.

can cause cancer, but what are we talking about here? How do we check the product? By the way, she's fighting back on MAHA today. I'm sure she is. Chemicals we should avoid. What ingredients should we be looking for? Right. So basically like you cannot name an ingredient, look it up to see what it is. There are plenty of apps and you can literally scan the zip card, the barcode to tell you whether or not this chemicals that make up this product have been deemed safe and or more risky for you. And it needs to to be pushed not only on the consumer to do back. She doesn't know what she's saying.

We need to have policies in place of where we say that these things should not be allowed within products. Hold on. Andrew, I'm going to stop you for a second. Did we, we didn't pull this off our computer. Yes,

we did. It was with the, I remember the last quarter. No, it's my, well, go forward a little more. No,

it was more time. I did a timestamp on it. So this may be the first part. Yeah. Sorry, just go from there. No, don't go from where you were. Just go ahead. I don't know.

But go almost to the end. But the comedy, though, both these women will now be saying my husband out of the line, right? Oh, yeah. That's a funny part. Go ahead. Typically, if you're already high risk because of either your family history or because of the demographic, I wish you belong to you.

All right. So somebody, all right. So this thing is, this thing's got to be like three minutes and 30 seconds. or something like that. No, no, no, no. Drew, do not, let's not get the poor boy confused. Is this thing three minutes and 33 seconds or something, some version of that? Three minutes and 29 seconds.

Okay. I was way off, wasn't it? Okay, we took it and broke it into two parts. This is the first part. This is the hair relaxer part. The second part is the same two women for four minutes talking about vaccines for kids. Now, got it. Let me grab that. We whacked it into two parts.

I don't know how, and again, we label things in an insane way, so it's not always, not always easy to find. But we took this seven-minute thing and whacked it into two chunks. But you're right. These two right now are railing against mom. Isn't that funny? Well, I have a lot of conversations with women, probably especially, where I go, who cares? Just let them try. Let them help.

trying to help. I don't fuck that guy. I don't trust that guy. It's like, just leave alone. Just let him do it. Just don't get, it's an interesting thing. I feel like I've a lot of conversation where I go, just leave it alone. Just don't get involved. Just don't get involved. Well, think about this. Leave it alone. And they go, I'm getting involved. And it's weird. Well, let's, let's decipher this a little bit. So let's just take the Maha announcement. They're making advising. They're suggesting. And you're saying, hey, let them, let them keep suggesting. Let them, let them keep going. When Newsom says, you can't eat outside. They're like, well, listen to the governor.

Listen to him. Right, right. How can you maintain the same? How do you have both thoughts? Right. I can't do it. Agreed. You can go to admirole.com for all the live shows. What do you got, Drew? Dr.com. Follow me on Twitter at the RDRAW, Dr. Drew, and look for our show 2 o'clock, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, Pacific Time. Some really interesting guests coming up. So, until next time, Adam Crow for Dr. Drew, saying, Mahala.

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