January 24, 2024 – If you have old bottles of prescription drugs or over-the-counter painkillers gathering dust behind your bathroom mirror, you're not alone. However, it's important to know what medications you have and what you can dispose of, and how to store and dispose of your pills carefully.
Let's start with the basics. Despite its name, the drug should not be kept in the bathroom medicine cabinet. According to experts, there are two main reasons for this.
The first is that medicine cabinets are usually located in bathrooms. It involves a lot of humidity and high temperatures.by CDCit has been found that storing drugs in areas with frequent temperature changes and high humidity can cause them to deteriorate faster.
The second reason to move your medications is because your medicine cabinet is often easily accessible to everyone you share your home with. Even kitchen cabinets aren't the best place to store medications if you want to keep them out of the hands of young children, people struggling with drug use, or teens with mental health issues. There is a possibility.and the studyshow Most household medicines are not stored properly.
When Suzanne Robotti was a child, her sister loved mountain climbing. One day, she entered the kitchen and her then 5-year-old sister climbed onto the counter and found her baby aspirin.
Her mother rushed her younger sister to the hospital after Mr. Robotti, founder of the drug safety group MedShadow Foundation and a consumer representative appointed to the FDA's Drug Safety and Risk Management Committee, lashed out. Brought in went.
„She did eat an entire bottle of infant aspirin, so they had to pump her into her stomach, which could have caused severe damage to her kidneys and liver. ” she said.
„It may sound crazy, but some people keep their drugs as secure as their guns. They can be just as dangerous as a gun in the wrong hands.“
When is the actual expiry date of the medicine?
Most medication bottles have an expiration date or „use by“ date of approximately one year from when you receive them. This is not true across the board, and especially not for all prescription drugs.
„It's like the milk you get. It's probably okay a little past its use-by date,“ said Dr. Marian Amirshahi, a toxicologist, emergency medicine physician, and co-director of the National Capital Poison Center.
„There's nothing magical about the day it expires. But that being said, you don't want to leave it out any longer than that,“ she said.
Whether a drug is past its expiration date by the date printed on the package has a lot to do with how the drug is stored. It also depends on your situation, says Joe Graydon, a pharmacist and co-host of the national call-in radio show „The People's Pharmacy.“
“You may be in a less critical situation and need sleep aids or allergy medication, but you may be carrying medications that are a week, a month, or even two or three months old. „If you are, it probably wasn't that bad,“ he said.
However, if you find yourself in a situation where medicine is absolutely necessary, have For example, if you have an infection and need antibiotics, or someone needs an EpiPen, you shouldn't take the risk.
There's a scenario that Amirshahi often sees during his work in both poison control and emergency rooms. The patient will say that he had antibiotics lying around the house from a previous infection and decided to take them for his current illness.
Here's why this is a problem: If you are prescribed antibiotics, you must finish them to completely eliminate the infection. avoid resistancesaid Amirshahi. There are also different antibiotics used for different infections. A prescription previously received for a urinary tract infection is not the same as one prescribed for a sinus infection. Finally, older antibiotics may be well past their expiry date and much less effective.
What should I do with my old medicine?
For many drugs, simply throwing the bottle in the trash isn't the best course of action. The best way to get rid of your old prescriptions is through take-back programs offered across the country. The FDA has resource This will help you find a drop-off location registered with your local Drug Enforcement Agency. Many pharmacies will also take away your old medicine and dispose of it safely.
If that doesn't work, Amirshahi suggests another solution.
„Most drugs can actually be put in cat litter or coffee grounds and then thrown away as dirty, so people don't want to take them,“ she says. „You want it to be completely tasteless.“
Under no circumstances should you flush your medication down the toilet. Research shows that if you do this, increased concentration Drugs enter the water supply and harm aquatic wildlife.