Medication Expiration Dates

As I was on vacation at my in-laws house and needed to take something for an allergy attack caused by their terrible cat (she's actually very sweet, just danderful), I checked the expiration date and was wondering if Sudafed (pseudoephedrine) that was 3 years past its expiration date was still going to work.

And it did. Because the expiration date doesn't actually mean when the medication stops working. It's just the amount of time the FDA will guarantee that the medication will work for and is usually somewhere between 1-3 years, but most medications in pill and capsule form are stable for much much longer than that. The catch is that there's no financial reason for the manufacturers to check and see how long they are effective for because that's just money out of their pockets.

There are some caveats to this - any liquid medications can be easily contaminated by bacteria as can medications that need to be refrigerated so you should heed their expiration dates. Similarly for prescription medications when it can be potentially dangerous if they're not working at 100%, when in doubt, throw it out.

I'd recommend sorting through your medicine cabinet about once a year and disposing of old medications through the Drug Take Back program at one of the many locations in San Mateo County (check them out here)

For a little bit more info on this, go here

And you can read much much more about all this here

Multivitamins

If you can get the lid off, you probably don't need them When I ask people if they are taking any vitamins, herbs or supplements, many people will say they are taking a multivitamin. When I ask them why they take it, I get a quizzical look most of the time. I think this is something that resonates from childhood and parental advice of the idea that we need vitamins to help our body develop. I'm not pediatrician so I can't speak to the effects on the developing child, but I will say that most non-pregnant adults without major medical conditions do not need extra vitamins. You'll be impressed by these labels promising 120%, 300%, 1200% of your daily dose of vitamin whatever it is, but the truth is that for most of these vitamins, if you take more than your daily dose your body needs, the rest just ends up in your urine. You are literally peeing money away in this case. There's been a new trendy vitamin every decade or so for the last 40-50 years; First it...

Kidney Stones

I've written about this previously , but it's often hard to explain to people what a 10 is on the "1-10" pain scale if they haven't been in that spot before. For women who have had children, they generally know what a 10 is, but for men it's a little harder. When I was a medical student on my psychiatry rotation, we had a patient calmly sitting there saying his pain level was at a 10 and our resident, who was an ex-military sniper with a large skull tattoo on his forearm and a crosshair through the eye, calmly leaned forward and asked, "so if I lit you on fire and ran you over with my truck, you could not be in more pain than you are now, correct?" The patient changed his answer. Getting to the point, a kidney stone is about the close I can come to describing a 10/10 pain to people who haven't gone through childbirth. The fundamental issue is similar - your body is trying to move a big solid thing through an opening that was not really desig...

NSAIDs

Advil and Motrin are ibuprofen, then you have Aleve (naproxen). Those are the over-the-counter ones. Prescriptions are Mobic (meloxicam), nabumetone, indomethacin, Toradol (ketorolac), diclofenac, Lodine, and the list goes on. All of these medications are in a class called non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs). I'm giving you this list because there is mounting evidence that these medications a) don't work as well as we'd thought and b) have some very serious long term side effects we're finding out more about. NSAID's act by reducing the amount of prostaglandins you make in order to reduce inflammation. However, prostaglandins have a ton of other effects and are involved in the maintenance of just about AIDs and also stronger if they are taken every day and/or around-the-clock. every other organ system that you have. The effect is stronger with higher doses of NS NSAID's work best and are best indicated for times when something is r...

Hey Doctor Scott ...

Search This Blog