How to divide a very small amount of something into several smaller but equal amounts accurately

Imagine a small prescription medication pill containing say 2.5mg of active ingredient per pill. You trust this accuracy but you know much of the weight of the pill isn’t the medication. You want to dose this medication at 0.5mg per dose. You don’t have a scale with a 0.0001g or finer accuracy and are not going to buy one.

How would you split this little pill into 5 equal doses?

I’ve got some ideas but I’m looking for your ideas first.

I wouldn’t try. How do you know the ingredient you are trying to isolate is evenly spread throughout the pill? Perhaps it’s in the coating , perhaps it’s time release. No way to tell.

You could dissolve the pill in 500mL of water, stir thoroughly to make sure all components of the pill are evenly distributed, and then separate the water into five 100mL portions.

The pill already has an indented line formed in it as a way to allow it to be broken in half. I’m sure the groove isn’t in there just because it looks good.

If the appropriate dosage you need is 1/5th of the pills you have, then you have the wrong pills. Take them back and have your doctor order the correct dosage.

Leahcim: This is kinda where I was going with my thinking.

My previous post was in response to MikeG

Dolphinboy: Not gonna work but thanks anyway.

I think, unless it’s a time release pill, you would be OK crushing the pill into fine powder, stirring it thoroughly, and dividing it into 5 equal looking piles on a mirror with a razor blade.

Just print out this thread and have that next to you while doing the job in case… you know…

Just print out this thread and have that next to you while doing the job in case… you know…

Ha! There’s nothing dangerous about this stuff.
Never been into snorting stuff off of mirrors but thanks anyway.

You know that, and I know that, but do They know that?

Well, they should now because I wrote as much on the internet.

There is a process that some people use to wean themselves off of habit forming medications over several months (under doctor’s supervision):

Take the day’s pill, crush it into dust, and dissolve it in 100ml of milk. Then discard n milliliters before drinking the rest of the milk. Increase the value of n every day, until after many weeks the daily dose is nothing.

Clearly, one could use this method to divide the medication into any desirable fraction, as long as it isn’t a time release pill, as others have said.

When dosing hatchling tortoises, I once crushed a tablet into a powder, then, on a piece of glass used a single edged razor blade to make numerous small piles.

That seems sort of wasteful but it certainly seems like a way that would work and reminds me of the dilution method mentioned in a previous post

The above post is in response to minor7flat5. kayaker: Yeah, I don’t think I want to go that route but thanks for the replay.

If this is an ongoing need you can contact a Compounding Pharmacy to make pills in custom dosages. It’s quite simple, just provide them with the prescription. In most cases they do not need to fill the prescription with the dosage size specified and can follow your instructions.

The pill is splittable in half. You can get a cheap pill splitter to do that. If you have a half, you can cut it in half again. That’s 0.625 instead of 0.500 mg. Why exactly do you need to get it more precise than that?

I have 3 methods; all involve crushing the pill into a fine powder. This is assuming you aren’t interested in building a makeshift balance beam out of toothpicks to try and get equal sized chunks of crudely broken pill.

2 of my methods have already been mentioned:

  1. Dissolve the pill into a known quantity of water or alcohol/oil (depending on what it’s soluble in), and mix thoroughly. If you have access to a simple kitchen measuring cup, divide the solution into 5. If you have no graduated measuring cup, first find a small cup and a bigger cup/bowl and fill the big one with the small one 5 times with your diluent. Now you can mix and re-split it into 5 again. Do the mixing/splitting, and either use it as a liquid, or if you need to remove the diluent then distill it back to 5 portions of powder or a sludge. *This assumes the active ingredient will dissolve, AND that whatever it’s dissolved in will not inactivate it (nor will the distillation process if you need it).

  2. divide the powder into 5 equal piles. My way would be to find a thin cylinder like a Bic pen or the ink tube inside one, then gently pour your powder into it. Mark the height the powder comes to, then either measure (or eyeball) and divide that height into 5; this gives you the same 3D volumetric shape for the “piles”, and it’s just your compaction rate that will vary slightly.

  3. Similar to #1 except your powder can’t be dissolved into a liquid. Assuming a non-chemical reaction, mix the powder into a dough-like paste with flour, butter, shortening, or something similar… even playdough. knead it for a long time until it has to be evenly distributed, then figure out a way to divide your dough ball into 5.

Most pills have the active ingredient very well-mixed into the entire uncoated pill body; the chemists and machinery used to make pills take great strides to do so. That industry isn’t like a local bakery which can get away with having all their blueberries sink to the bottom of the muffins they make. Pills are routinely split by patients at home and bad batches or poorly mixed batches will get the manufacturer in trouble very fast.

I think I’m going to try dissolving in a measured amount of warm distilled water.