Ok - so I was popping my morning pills & vitamins which now includes a daily OTC allergy pill.
Since I take it every morning with everything else, I started to just pop them out of the blister pack and put them in my pill sorter. But then, being overanalytical and under-caffeinated - I started to wonder: why blister packs?
Why are some pills put in blister packs and some in bottles? Does the blister pack keep it fresher? Or is it just a packaging device? And why make a blister pack where there are 6 slots but only 5 pills?
I’m not asking for medical advice - just wondering about pharmaceutical packaging methods - so I’m hoping this is okay to ask here.
This is pure speculation, but I bet it is marketing and has to do with the number of pills being sold in the pack. Allergy pills which are rather expensive for over the counter medication typically come in relatively small sets, say 24 pills. This would be have to be packed in a very small bottle, or an almost empty larger bottle. Neither option would make the consumer feel they were getting their money’s worth. By putting them in a blister pack it makes it appear that they are getting a more substantial product. As for pills like vitamins and aspirin, they are sold in quantities in the hundreds and so would be unwieldy to sell in blister packs.
My birth control pills come in a blister pack, with each blister labeled with the day the pill needs to be taken. Makes it much harder to forget to take one, or take two in one day by mistake.
As a chronic user of allergy medicine, the blister packs are much nicer for taking with you - sure, you can chuck a bottle in your backpack, but it rattles all to hell. A blister pack is quieter, and you can put one or two in a wallet, to have with you just in case. Unfortunately, they also cost many times as much as in a bottle.
I buy generic Zyrtec from Costco. It comes in bottles of pills, not blister packs.
And it can open as it gets jostled around in a purse or backpack. I’ve had this happen even with childproof caps. Then you have to try to find all the pills that spilled, and put them back in the bottle, which is a pain in the butt. They might have gotten into the crud that accumulates in the bottoms of backpacks and purses, too, and be all nasty.
Some tablets are sensitive to air - for example, Claritin’s “ready-tabs” would turn to mush pretty quickly in free air as they absorb humidity if they were loose in a bottle.
I’ll put a single blister with a pill in my pocket for hikes or travel. A bottle doesn’t work for that. I’ve also found that when a lot of rough travel occurs that bulk pills in a bottle do break apart from tumbling around together.
A while back, I went to Walmart to fill some scrips that I had been getting through the mail. They filled one of my meds with 3 30-day blister-pack cards in these ridiculous blue plastic sleeves that are abominable to deal with. On top of that, the damn backing for the blister pack is so strong that half the time I break the damn pill trying to get it out.
I will be transferring that scrip to Walgreens this week in the hopes of getting a bottle.
Child safety types say that blister packs are more secure from small children than “child-safe” caps are. Most kids can get into a child safe cap pretty easily.
As others have mentioned, there are marketing and preservation issues for some medications. You can be pretty sure it’s a marketing decision when there are empty slots like Nyquil does with their liquigels. That’s just a way to keep prices and packaging sizes consistent while reducing the actual amount of medicine you get.
Well, I take lots of pills and I fill one of those pill organizers every 28 days and the ones that come in blister packs are a royal pain in the ass. Especially, since virtually all of them are taken mainly by seniors and some of them (fortunately not me, not yet anyway) have a great deal of difficulty with the blister packs. The pharmacist can just as well count out 30 pills (that is what my prescriptions call for) as give me an overpackaged box. It can’t just be marketing either, since these are all prescriptions.
This is one aspect of blister packs (and the packaging for things like suppositories). Different packages have different ratings with regards to the amount of moisture they will allow to permeate through in a certain amount of time (and it’s a bitch of a thing to test in a lab, too).
Moisture absorbed into a pill could simply affect it’s structure (make it mushy) or it could affect it’s chemical composition as the water reacts with ingredients, thereby reducing the effectiveness of the pill and increasing the risks of side effects that go along with undermedication and/or consumption of degradation products by the patient.
Some blister packs are also opaque and/or made of a plastic that will block out certain wavelengths of light. This is because the drug/ingredients in the tablet may be photoreactive as well as sensitive to moisture.
Packaging moisture sensitive products in a bottle can be convenient, but often involves a can of desiccant as well, which increases the cost. Many people toss the desiccant out immediately as well, which isn’t really a good thing.
I did work on a drug in a package like this years ago. Packaged in a cardboard blister pack, and damn near impossible to get the pills out. The funny thing (to us lab rats, at least) is that the medication was to treat a heart condition. We’d laugh at the idea of some poor guy keeling over of a heart attack from the strain of trying to get to his heart pills!
Although I have no clue what the reasoning was behind that package, I still felt that, perhaps, the guys who made the decision neglected to think about the clients taking the pills! Like the arthritis meds my sister used to be on…in a child-proof bottle that she couldn’t open when her arthritis flared up. A couple of times, she even had to go ask a neighbour to open her bottles for her, since she was alone and couldn’t do it!
This strikes me as a very cruel thing to do. (Packaging the pills like that … not asking the neighbor.)
Some sort of cruel joke. I know, I know, kids* shouldn’t be getting into those things, but still …
*I once dated a guy who loved fruit-flavored candy. His family likes telling the story where as a very young child he found and ate an entire bottle of Tums, the kind that come in fruit flavors. Every. Last. One.
Arthritis and heart medications you can request in a non-childproof bottle. It will then come with a myriad of warning stickers all over it screaming THIS IS NOT CHILD RESISTANT! THIS IS NOT CHILD RESISTANT! To which I say good because my household does not have children and my arthritic spouse needs to get in the fracking bottle! Ditto for when mom-with-the-heart-disease was still alive. Same thing - no children in household, frail old lady needs her heart pills NOW!
Another reason that just occurred to me is inventory control - it’s a piece of cake for a clerk to flip though “cards” of pre-packed pills and count them, rather than tying up a pharmacist’s time to pour the bottle out, count them, then pour them back into the bottle.
Also, with meds like antibiotics that are almost always given in standard amounts, they make a lot of sense. The parmacy tech can grab a Z-Pak off the shelf and slap a label on it in seconds, vs having to get the bulk supply bottle, count out however azythromycin tablets (seven?) and bottle them for the patient, then put away the bulk supply bottle.
Insurance also drives how meds are packaged - some of the larger HMOs such as Kaiser Permanente started to demand one-month supply pre-pack bottles from the drug makers about 15 or so years back. If it’s cheaper to put 30 pills on a blister pack card than into a bottle, we’ll probably be seeing more blister packs as insurance companies, pharmacies and drug makers try to trim costs.
I had to take industrial strength iron supplements for a while. Not only were the pills in blister packs, they were in indestructable blister packs. I had to get the heavy shears to cut them open.
I finally told the doctor that I was not taking the pills because I couldn’t get the packs to open, and he said it was to prevent kids from eating the pills. I don’t care…if a product is too difficult to open, then I’ll either find a different product or go without.
