These days, before reaching for an aspirin or Tylenol to take care of a raging headache or an injured muscle, I ask myself if I really need them.

But this wasn't always the case. For years, I treated over-the-counter drugs as a kind of preventative talisman.

If I stayed up too late, I'd pop Tylenol [0] to ward off the next day's potential headache. If I suspected that a cold might be coming on (or sometimes, if a bug was going around), I'd take some aspirin as a preemptive strike, just in case I might start to feel bad.

And if I'd had too much to drink, my brilliant strategy was to take two Tylenols with two big glasses of water before going to sleep. This magic formula, I was sure, could chase away even the worst hangover.

I never thought twice about it, until a pharmacist friend happened to mention that if aspirin or acetaminophen were trial drugs waiting for approval from the Food and Drug Administration today, chances are they'd never get the thumbs' up.

Her view is that their side effects [1] — including gastrointestinal bleeding and liver and kidney failure — can be so severe that the FDA [1] most likely wouldn't let these drugs go to market today, even with a prescription.

So, I was glad to see that the FDA's warning that over-the-counter [2]painkillers [3] are far more dangerous [4] than most of us realize. They're safe enough, when used appropriately. But a lot of people exceed the maximum dosages, and overdoses kill few hundred people each year.

Yesterday, the FDA proposed putting warning labels on common pain-killers, informing us about the risk of liver failure from acetaminophen and gastrointestinal bleeding from other medicines like aspirin, ibuprofen (aka Advil), and naproxen (aka Aleve).

The labels will also warn people to skip a pain reliever if you've had three or more drinks. In other words, it wasn't even remotely brilliant to pop Tylenol as a pre-hangover remedy.

I'm glad that the FDA is taking this step. But I'm not sure why they waited so long. Had they made the risks clear, most of us never would have used these drugs so casually.

After all, it's easy enough to deal with a hangover or sore muscles. But the same can't be said about liver failure.