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To: Velveeta
Does anyone know how many aspirin one would have to ingest to die of 'aspirin poisoning'?

I'd never heard of it before

.

94 posted on 09/13/2009 4:18:15 AM PDT by Elle Bee
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To: Elle Bee; Velveeta
Found this online using the search term "aspirin suicide":

http://www.well.com/~art/suicidepge5.html

...Seemingly innocent aspirin is "one of the messiest, most complicated overdoses you ever hope to see," he said. People who swallow lots of aspirin react first by getting sick to their stomachs. Beyond that, it affects nearly every system in the body unpredictably, and two different people who took 100 aspirins could get sick in completely different ways. Aspirin is an acid. It burns the gastrointestinal tract from the inside. It changes the blood's pH level which is normally at 7.4 (close to neutral). It sometimes makes the blood acidic, but it also accelerates the brains' breathing control center, which puffs out carbon dioxide twice as fast as it normally would, and thus makes the blood alkaline. Either way, it throws off the metabolic balance among kidney, lung and blood. "It produces fever," McKinney said. "The fever, in turn, if it goes on long enough to overheat the brain, can cause seizures. You can burn out parts of your nervous system." Aspirin also carries a high risk of gastric hemorrhage. Occasionally people on aspirin overdoses become deaf or develop a ringing in their ears that doesn't go away...

128 posted on 09/13/2009 10:46:20 AM PDT by Screaming_Gerbil (The light at the end of the tunnel might be a muzzle flash...)
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