I significantly prefer blister packs over pill bottles. Blister packs are easier to travel with. They take up less space in my medical cabinet. I can see how many pills I have left without looking inside of an opaque container. I actually would feel safer if my pills were packaged in a factory by a machine than at a pharmacy by a human.
Many countries in the world use individually-sealed blister packs for medicine distribution.
I think in this case the benefits might outweigh any downsides. Taking the correct medication as perscribed is a major source of stress and problems for many people.
> Medication non adherence in patients leads to substantial worsening of disease, death and increased health care costs.
> and sometimes involves individual constraints (e.g. poor inhaler technique, problems remembering doses etc).
> A third type of non adherence is known as non conforming, this type includes a variety of ways in which medication are not taken as prescribed, this behavior can range from skipping doses, to taking medications at incorrect times or at incorrect doses, to even taking more than prescribed.
What are the benefits for blister packs except overdose protection? Are they recyclable like pill bottles? One of the reasons US uses pill bottles is pharmacies, where pharmacists fill in any amount of pills needed in a bottle, e.g. if you need just 3 pills of really strong pain killer, you get a bottle with three pills. As far as I remember blister packs packaged in a factory and not customizable.
Personally, I use habit tracking app to check in every night to mark I took my pills.
In what way would this cut down on wasted medications? Because it’s portioned? FYI you can still find pharmacies that will pack your medications in blister packs for a nominal surcharge or sometimes free. Or just use a pill box.
I much prefer pill bottles, i find blisters to be fiddly, especially when they add the paper on top that needs to be peeled off before i can push the pill through the foil (i mean why would they do this)
I have a prescription that means I take eight pills in one go. And they are provided in blister packs. It's really annoying. I can see that this is a thing.
That's not the reason. Benadryl being in blister packs long predates its use in meth cooking, like by 30 years. The real reason is more likely marketing. If they sold them in a bottle, the amount they charge for those few tiny pills would seem outrageous. A blister pack gives the packaging more volume.
Blister packs help, but they won't buzz on your wrist at the right time to take the meds (with a text reminder indicating what all of the buzzing is about).
Maybe I'm missing something, but I'm not even sure how blister packs help protect against accidental overdose beyond the protection you'd get from just counting the pills in the bottle. In either case, you could accidentally skip a day and double dose later on based on the number of pills remaining, especially if you aren't sure what day you started taking the medication. I can definitely see the benefit of a product that doesn't rely on user reporting to track doses.
I'd never considered blister packs as an impulse control measure before; I had assumed it was for ease of dosing/packaging, and perhaps longer shelf-life (The US approach of (until relatively recent automation improvements) manually counting pills into a bottle always struck me as inefficient).
A short transcript[1] from the podcast agrees though, and there's a currently previous[2] and ongoing[3] research into packaging/impulsivity.
There's some other research as well that shows that restricting pack size of OTC paracetamol/acetaminophen reduces suicides, too[4]
In the UK the vast majority of medications come in blister packs corresponding to a typical dose. So pharmacists are not counting individual pills, only trays. This seems like an obvious thing that the US could adopt.
In New Zealand, I sometimes receive prescription medication in a generic box full of blister packs, where the last blister pack has been cut down to match the prescribed number of doses.
Occasionally I'll get a couple of cut down sheets, presumably using up the leftovers from other people's prescriptions.
That's pretty much a USA thing, though. In Europe you'll usually only come across blister packs, and they don't really go beyond 50 / box. It is a lot harder to accidentally OD when you have to individually remove every single pill from a blister pack, rather than just chugging a fistful straight out of the bottle.
> the other ingredients we think are filler, but they are actually necessary to stabilize the active ingredients?
Tablets are cheaper to make than capsules, so you’ll at least have filler, if not binders as some molecules don’t stick together well. Other times they’ll stick together too well and not dissolve without something to help.
If you put a milligram of an active ingredient in a capsule, everyone will think you sold them empty capsules.
Another benefit I've heard (perhaps an extreme version of the third type) is that it cuts down on impulsive suicides. It's easy to throw back a whole bottle of pills and take a month's worth of doses in a few seconds. The blister packs make you really work for it.
Well, it keeps out humidity, and might prevent air-exposure effects. It won't prevent heat effects and some other environmental effects.
Also, quite a lot are sold in bottles of pills or other non-blister-pack forms.
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