I have thought that there would be a great market opportunity for a custom pharmacy - making up packets of pills like those packs of vitamins, just one pack of maintenance meds per scheduled dose time [frex, I take a selection of meds at 5 am, 1pm, 5 pm and 9 pm, slightly different assortment of pills in each dose time] so I would have a sheet of cardboard divided into 7 days columns, with 4 rows, one for each timeslot and a small bag of pills adhered to each timeslot. All I would have to do is grab the specific little packet of pills for that timeslot. Would be great in institutional or caregiver situations where people are on maintenance meds [rather than the add this drug and see if it works phase of chronic illnesses]
I hate blisterpacks that are impossible to access the meds within=( there are 2 available brands of omeprazole in my end of hte state, one is impossible to open, the other is perfect - just a thin skin of foil that the pill pops through with only slight pressure. Guess which one the Navy carries in their pharmacy?
The pill organizer I use for a 28 day supply is actually intended for one week-four times a day. So you would have to fill it once a week, but it is worth the effort. In fact, I use two of them one for morning pills and the second for evening and I put a 28 day supply in each. They are really good for one pill I take in which the dosage alternates between one 5 mg pill and 1 1/2 pills. Anyway, I strongly recommend that organizer.
I had the same problem with those damn iron pills. I finally sat down with the shears one day and cut the whole mess of them open and put them in a bottle. Took forever! And the darn things didn’t work, so I had to do the IV iron treatment. Believe me, five one-hour sessions hooked up to an IV was a lot easier to take than cutting those stupid blister packs open!
Checked that the first time I tried to push through and broke a pill. Nope, just really, really thick foil. For a few days, I pre-stressed it with a fingernail, then I got fed up, sat down one evening, and sliced every single one open with a sharp knife and put all the gorram pills in an empty pill bottle.
Some drugs, like pseudoephedrine hydrochloride, are deliberately put in packaging that is difficult to open easily. This is an attempt to cut down on the speed cookers who use it as a base material.
I don’t use or manufacture speed, and I hate the blister packaging.
When I was working in a lab and the product I was testing involved blister packs that were hard to open, I perfected a rather rapid technique of pulling the tablets out of the pack using a pair of tweezers like these. Poke one tine into the back of the pack next to the tablet, pinch the foil/cardboard and twist to pull the foil/cardboard off. The tablet either falls out, or pick it up with the tweezers (which was more useful to me when doing lab testing).
It’s amazing the range of no-longer-useful “skills” I picked up working there. I can also pipette ambidextrously, but I’m never going to have to do that again. And I’m very good at remembering longish strings of numbers and letters long enough to transcribe them somewhere else without having to go back and look every couple of characters. Not something worth putting on a resumé!
I have 4 of these … so my month is taken care of, and the cells are big enough to hold the needle for my autoinject =) I had been usingthis one, but when I aded in the calcium horsepills, i needed more space.
As has been noted, some antibiotic courses, like azithromycin, are given in just a few doses: two pills on day one, then one pill per day for the next 4 days due to the potency. It makes more sense to put them in a blister pack which is easy to carry and does not allow a cap to pop off and spill pills all over one’s pocket or purse.
When I did my intermediate rotation at a independent pharmacy, they did this exact thing. They would fill a blister pack with the medications you were suppose to take at a particular time. Of course, they did charge a pretty penny to do this, and insurance wouldn’t cover it.
When I took Accutane, it came in a blister pack which seemed to be hard to open by design. You have to open the box, tear off the paper tabs covering the blisters, and then pop the pills out. The entire time you’re looking at pictures of deformed babies and warnings saying “Do not take while pregnant!” I think they wanted to drill the message into your head. It sure worked for me; I have not gotten pregnant ever since I took it as a teenage boy.
Typo Knig and I both take Prilosec. Which, being over the counter, is packaged in those damn blister packs. Theirs have been particularly hard to open. Recently they redesigned the packaging… which was a big PR thing for them. Basically the slogan is “Our packaging used to be 10 out of 10 for sheer suckitude, now it’s only 8.5!!”.
We bought the generic for a long time… not only cheaper, but theirs was only 9.5 for suckitude. Then the packaging on the brand-name was redone, so we switched. I actually emailed the Prilosec people saying “uh, it’s enough of an improvement that we’ve switched back to the brand name… but it would still be a HELL of a lot better if it were available in bottles for us long-term users”. I got a robo-reply saying “Yay! That’s what we hoped you’d think!!” (in other words, they completely ignored the second part of it).
Sudafed (and the generic) - yeah, we like our contraband here - is in blister packs but their blister packs are easy to open.
Except a lot of the time even peeling them was impossible (see my post about Prilosec). We used scissors.
Check the prices online from Amazon - cheapest I’ve found (brand name at least, the generic may be slightly cheaper) and you can get even more of a discount if you “subscribe”.
We’ve never found the generic with the really-easy version that you mention. Of course even the brand is a pain, but it is at least possible to open without weapons.
