I’m finding it impossible to fathom being that nosy. But privacy (giving and receiving) is a huge, huge deal with me.
I voted no. I might open cabinets for toothpaste is my date was asleep and I needed toothpaste or toilet paper, but I wouldn’t look around. I’d just grab what was needed and then go back to bed.
I don’t know if you know this, a diabetic who is having a bad reaction has breath that smells like juicy fruit gum. This applies to cats as well 
(honestly, it does apply to cats, I’ve never smelled a diabetic dogs breath)
Had I been there, I would have run to the kitchen because most insulin needs to be kept refridgerated and I’d expect the needles to be somewhere close. Medicine cabinet would have been next.
But, yeah. If I’m sleeping with someone, the health issues would have been discussed before the boinking stuff happened.
Zovirax ain’t prescribed for the crazy…
I don’t look in people’s cabinets and drawers unless I’m searching for something specific.
It’s never occurred to me to look because I’m not insecure and batshit crazy. I figure medical issues should come up only when they’re relevant. For instance a girl I’m seeing now has a mild gluten allergy and asthmatic, and both came up in conversation.
It appears that people just assume the worst of cabinet-peekers. In my case, I really am just peeking, not rummaging and digging for dark secrets. It’s more like, hey, he uses Tom’s of Maine and Mitchum, too. I guess I never figured the bathroom cabinets to be a place where secret stashes are kept. Plain Band-Aid brand or rainbow unicorns? Curious minds want to know!
And all of you people who keep meds in the bathroom really should find a different place to keep them, not because of snooping, but because the warm humid environment that is frequently in a bathroom is really bad for the drugs, it makes them degrade faster and not work as well through the expiration date.
I’m female and I voted yes. I’ve talked to girlfriends about it and they do it too; this is why I never keep anything of a personal/embarrassing nature in a medicine cabinet. Toothpaste? Yes. Lube? No.
As for why I look…I dunno. The same reason I like looking into peoples’ fridges and pantries. It’s not “Ooooh, my god, what secrets can I discover!” but more like simple human curiosity about what other people buy/consume/whatever. The same reason I look at what’s in other peoples’ grocery carts. “Oh, she uses Pantene…he must love frozen pizza…ew, green beans, I hate those…”
Maybe I’m more curious than others here, but honestly I’ve always considered medicine cabinets to be like fridges and pantries. If you visit someone’s house, particularly more than once or twice, you’re probably going to see inside them. I’ve always assumed everyone looks in medicine cabinets. (Or every female, at any rate, because women are more curious about mundane details then men are, generally speaking.)
Of course I looked in Mr. Levins’ medicine cabinet when we started dating. He’s asleep right now but I will have to ask him if this knowledge would have surprised or disturbed him at the time.
Female, and it just wouldn’t occur to me. I wouldn’t want people looking in my cabinets just for the sake of having a nosey, so I wouldn’t do it to them.
Yeah, this is the other reason I don’t keep any there. The “medicine cabinet” is pretty much the worst place to keep meds.
Bolding mine.
Female, I wouldn’t look in early stages of dating, but I will note what I see in plain view. I’m a nurse, so more often than not, people ask me things about the medicine they are taking. (and oh, do you want to see my rash, my fungal toenails, do you know why sometimes I get a pain after I eat, my neighbour has haemochromotosis, do you know what that is… )
Sometimes I see a pill bottle in the cupboard beside the sink where the water glasses are, and I think… Oh, beta blockers… hmm he doesn’t look like he has hypertension but you never can tell… maybe migraines? I don’t ask, because I have a highly tuned sense of confidentiality, but later if you tell me you are getting “one of your bad headaches” I will ask questions about migraine headache history, because I already have reason to suspect that. On the other hand if I know you have beta blockers and suddenly have chest pain I am going to ask questions around cardiac events.
But although I am a nurse and knowing your meds might give me a shortcut to an assessment, it doesn’t give me a right to snoop. I can’t help what I see or know however.
FWIW one of the reasons(there were many more than one) I broke up with penultimate boyfriend was because I strongly suspected he had hypertension, diabetes and probably a few other things and he wouldn’t go to the doctor about it. He wanted to make plans for the future but I didn’t see there would be a future with him in it for long if he didn’t/wouldn’t take care of himself. (We talked about seeing a doctor in April, then his best friend has a massive heart attack in July so we talked about it again. Then his sister mentioned it in September and I reminded him in November. By the following April, after another friend of his died from health issues, I was fed up. He went to the doctor after we broke up and is a diabetic, has hypertention and a few other things. Breaking his heart may have saved his life.
I guess my feelings about this are that it isn’t so much about the intentions of the peeker as it is about the privacy of the person living there. I don’t see an invitation into my home – even in a dating setting – as an open invitation into every aspect of my life.
For those of you who do peek or snoop, you know from this thread, if nothing else, that there definitely ARE people who would be bothered by you looking in their medicine cabinet. Would you still do it if you knew ahead of time that the person would be bothered by it? And if so, why act on the assumption that the person wouldn’t be bothered by it?
Ah, see, I don’t look into those unless invited to do so, either!
I’m a male and no, I wouldn’t look in anyone’s medicine cabinet unless they directed me there if I asked if they hand any aspirin or such.
I keep a cheap digital camera in there rigged to snap a photo of anyone who would dare stoop to that level of snoopery.
mmm
I wouldn’t, only because I don’t want to take the chance of her hearing me opening and closing her medicine cabinet. 
I look. It’s better to assume everyone is going to look. That’s why I keep a box of magnum condoms in there and the regular size ones in my night drawer. Ha ! suprise that’ll learn ya for peeking.
Best put from a Seinfeld episode:
Elaine: I trust people to not look in there.
Kramer: Big mistake.
Oh my. I always peek, and I swear it’s not for nefarious purposes. I’m just curious. And I am not really a snoopy kind of girl. I’d never check e-mails or anything like that. But I’m like hey! he uses Brut, and that’s his kind of deodarant? I don’t even make a mental note of it. Of all of the medicine cabinets I’ve peeked into I probably couldn’t hazard a guess as to what any of them contained, other than in the most general terms. And I certainly don’t look at medications…
as for not doing it because people don’t want me to, I don’t actually see the harm if I never judge you for anything inside the medicine cabinet (and indeed have forgotten what was in there two minutes after I walk out. So I don’t think I’ll stop just for the hell of it but if I do find out someone really doesn’t like it, of course I’ll stop.
I recently had prescriptions for Percocet and some muscle relaxers after hurting my back, and I left them lying on the coffee table at my new friend’s apartment. She showed no interest whatsoever in them, but then again, she might have looked at them while I was sleeping.
If you just snoop, and don’t say anything about it, that’s one thing. I’ll be a bit unhappy about that, but it won’t really be a big deal. If you snoop, and then confront me about what you find, that would be a big red flag. If you acted like you had done nothing wrong by snooping, that’s another big red flag. I’m not sure it would be an immediate dealbreaker, but it would not be a good sign. I might think that someone who did snoop might be looking for drugs to steal.
Sorry, I don’t owe you a full medical history if you’re dating me. I would feel obligated to tell you about anything contagious before it got to the point where you might get it, but that’s it.
Absolutely not. Primarily, trust is important, and a big part of trust is privacy. To me, any sort of snooping is unacceptable as the desire to do so either demonstrates one’s own lack of respect for other people’s boundaries or an inability to trust those individuals. I will never snoop, and I trust that others will not snoop either. If there’s concern about something, I’d rather just discuss it up front. If it’s something important that you should know, either they will tell you when they feel they can trust you, they won’t tell you because it’s not your business, or they’ll lie about it. Even in the last case, you’ll catch them eventually, but if you find out in the other cases, that trust in an otherwise good relationship has been compromised.
Seconardily, just because you find something, it doesn’t necessarily mean what you think it means. Say, for instance, that you look in the medicine cabinet and find a bunch of Vicodin. Maybe they’re absuing it. Maybe they really hurt themselves 6 months back and that’s what’s left over. Maybe it was left behind by someone else. That is, sure, you can make assumptions about what it means, but if you run off of that, you’re a jack ass, and the only way to confirm anything you find out is to admit that you were snooping.