We have similar discussions about expired medications. I'd heard medications were often safe and effective well past their expiration date ; she's ready to throw them out if they're even close to the date on the bottle.
The U. Air Force started a study in described here and later extended it to other military services in the early s. The military had gathered a stockpile of medications worth more than a billion dollars that were close to or past their expiration dates. No one wanted to throw away expensive medications that might still be safe and effective. So the drugs were extensively tested with oversight by the U. Well, sort of.
Before ignoring expiration dates on medications, there are a few caveats to keep in mind:. Once the expiration date has passed there is no guarantee that the medicine will be safe and effective. If your medicine has expired, do not use it. Failing to safely dispose of old medications, especially opioids, all too often leads to dangerous drugs ending up in the wrong hands. Finally, expired medicines are also not just a risk to the person they were prescribed for and can injure children and pets if taken by mistake.
For all these reasons, proper disposal of unneeded medicines is essential. A drug take-back program, if available, is the preferred way to dispose of expired, unwanted, or unused medicine. Preparing for the holidays? The big question is, do pills expire? With a splitting headache, you reach into your medicine cabinet for some aspirin or ibuprofen only to find the stamped expiration date on the medicine bottle is more than a year out of date. So, does medicine expire? Do you take it or don't you?
If you decide to take the medication, will it be a fatal mistake or will you simply continue to suffer from the headache? And how long is a prescription good for? This is a dilemma many people face in some way or another. A column published in Psychopharmacology Today offers some advice. It turns out that the expiration date on a drug does stand for something, but probably not what you think it does. Since a law was passed in , drug manufacturers are required to stamp an expiration date on their products.
This is the date at which the manufacturer can still guarantee the full potency and safety of the drug. Most of what is known about drug expiration dates comes from a study conducted by the Food and Drug Administration at the request of the military. With a large and expensive stockpile of drugs, the military faced tossing out and replacing its drugs every few years. Take these separately from other medication so they can be absorbed as intended.
It can be very confusing standing in the cold-and-flu aisle in a drugstore trying to match what you have with what you need. The first bit of advice from Hall is that differences between medications offering the same relief are negligible. If you have a cough, Hall suggested it's probably best to let it buck during the day, although you may need to suppress it during the night.
That is our core skill set-assessing what's the best medication for anybody at any one time. Hall said when you have expired medications you aren't going to use anymore, bring them back to the pharmacy to be incinerated. It prevents them from getting into our landfills and water supply, and exposing people to chemicals they don't need to be exposed to.
Should I take my antibiotics until I run out of them?
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