Granted, I have no experience with birth-control pills :), but the only prescription I’ve had that comes on cards / in blister packs has been a blood-pressure med which the instructions indicate is moisture-sensitive (and, as such, you’re not supposed to remove it from the card until you’re about to take it). Everything other prescription I’ve had as an adult (oral diabetes pills, statins, painkillers, antibiotics) has always just come loose in a bottle.
Yeah, BCPs are another example of specialized packaging. And my son’s primary ADHD medication is a transdermal patch that comes in plastic sleeves, 30 to a sealed-in-foil plastic box (inside another cardboard box). So there are a few exceptions, but they’re in the fringe minority.
Hubster and I both need a wide variety of medications, plus we have the usual aches, pains, sneezes, and even gut rumbles. I can tell one pill from another, so I have a lovely, multi-colored assortment in a pill bottle tucked into my purse.
There are a couple of Vicodin and maybe even a Xanax or two in the mix.
Yes, yes, I know, I’m just ASKING for a plethora of State and Federal drug charges to be levied upon me if we are ever stopped and searched.
If I carried a labeled bottle for EACH medication in my purse, I’d have to have a cabinet on a wagon to transport everything. Plus, we get our medications from a mail-order pharmacy, three months’ worth at a time. THOSE pill bottles are big enough to hold a Thanksgiving turkey (or two).
Nah, I’ll take my chances.
Besides, if we were EVER stopped and searched, I’d be absolutely too entertaining for the cops to bother with searching my purse. I’m profoundly hearing impaired and have a lousy sense of balance, so I wouldn’t be able to understand, much less FOLLOW any instructions beyond, “Get out of the car.”
You don’t see too many grey-haired old bats on COPS getting the shakedown. I’ll be okay.
I hope.
~VOW
I think that a lot of kinds of pills are available in blister packs, but they are substantially more expensive that way, and that’s not what you usually get. However, they are more commonly used in nursing homes and such places, where some staff person sets out pills for lots of people. They are much more convenient for the staff that way, I think.
I lived in a “board and care” home for about a year, several years ago. The “house mother” set out everybody’s pills a whole week at a time, and saw to it that their prescriptions got refilled, and all that. (Except me. I had private coverage whereas everybody else was on medi-medi, so I took care of all my own meds.) Anyway, they always ordered all meds for everybody in the blister packs.
I don’t know if ALL meds are available that way, but clearly a lot are.
They have a Physician’s Desk Reference manual. They don’t carry it around, of course, but they do have one at the station. I’ve seen many reports where the officer describes the markings on the pill, plus its size, shape, and color, and lists the drug name as it appears in the PDR.
Sometimes people carry pills around in the wrong prescription bottle. My prescriptions from CVS have a label that describes the shape, color, and markings of the medications that should be inside. Came in handy once, when the pills I received were the right medicine, but in the wrong dosage…
I used to work in a pharmacy that supplied nursing homes with those blister packs. I don’t know the cost breakdown, but the blister packs were custom-produced for the particular person according to their prescription, and that has to increase costs substantially.
I think the packs are more convenient, but I think the main reason for the custom packs is medication tracking. Let’s say a person had a prescription for a blood pressure pill once every day, in the morning. The pharmacy technician would place one pill in each slot (there are 31) of the front piece, put the back portion of the card (with the little foil bubbles that push through) in place, and put the pack in the sealer. Voila! Custom made blister pack. If a nurse needs to know whether the patient has had the blood pressure medication that morning, it’s easy enough to check the blister pack.
Cards for February only had pills in slots 1-28. For medications taken more than once a day, blister packs are marked AM or PM (or lunch, or bedtime, or whatever). We had medications like Synthroid where they took one dose every other day, and an alternate dose on alternate days. The patient gets two cards for the month, with pills in every other day on each card. (Most technicians hated those prescriptions; you really have to slow down and be careful on those.) Of course, everything got checked by a pharmacist before being sent out.
The summer camp my son went to for several years had a service they required you to use if your kid was on medication that did this–put them in custom blister packs. The fee alone was $50, PLUS the cost of the medications, which you had to buy through that company. Fortunately, my son’s medication is, as I mentioned, not a pill but a transdermal patch and thus can’t be packaged in that way, so we were able to send him to camp with his regular box of medication, bought at CVS for our regular price.