Good question, and I have to admit that I don’t know for sure, since I never worked as a Formulation chemist.
I think it’s more a case that we know that scored tablets are uniform, because we checked (there are lab/quality control tests for it), but we don’t know if non-scored tablets are uniform, because we didn’t check, because there was no expectation that we would. Does that make sense?
As a WAG, I would think that particle sizing and drying/pressing processes could lead to non-uniformity inside the tablet. When the drug+filler mix is separated out into tablet portions, the manufacturing process has shown that, say, 100mg of active always gets portioned out, and each pill is, essentially, exactly the same as any other. But perhaps the manufacturing process after that point is such that the active tends to agglomerate or settle in such a way that it isn’t uniform anymore. Like the raisins in a box of Raisin Bran, the smaller “particles” might settle to the bottom, so you don’t have any in the top layer of the box, but every box is the same anyways (yeah, I know, it’s a bad analogy, but it’s what comes to mind at the moment!). So splitting that box in half won’t give you two equal (massive) cereal bowls, but serving the whole box at once would.
As I said, though, that’s just a WAG, and I really don’t know.
Yes, but there’s no guarantee that the batch was properly mixed. Ever mixed cake batter? It’s very easy to not have a uniform dispersment of ingredients depending on the method of manufacture.
Bearing in mind that a pill is tiny, I find it hard to imagine that you could mix the ingredients well enough that be sure that a given whole pill will contain (subject to tolerances) no more and no less than a certain amount of the active ingredient, while not mixing them well enough that you can be sure that this would also be true for half a pill.
Putting it another way, it seems impossible to me that something could be mixed badly enough that it was sufficiently non-homogenous that half a pill made from the mixture might differ significantly in quantity of active ingredient from its other half, without it also being true that this lack of homogeneity would lead to a significant portion of whole pills also lacking the appropriate amount of active ingredient. It’s just not possible.
There’s as good a guarantee as you’re going to get without subjecting every last pill to individual testing. Every step in the process is controled and documented, and deviations are reported and investigated to determine potential effect on the product, and randomized quality control testing is done on every lot, and depending on the process, on several stages of the lot’s manufacture. The QC sampling varies by product/company and I never did the sampling, but basically it’s product from the “beginning”, “middle” and “end” of the run, and multiple individual tablets/capsules/etc are tested for each of those sets, and they need to have 100.0% +/- 2.0% (typically…there are some exceptions, usually to +/- 2%, and very few to 3% IME) of the expected dose, as well as pass their individual impurity requirements, and whatever else suits their drug type; average weight, colour/appearance, dissolution, liquids will have pH, viscosity, fill volume… The quality control is somewhat more rigourous than cake making.
Assuming, of course, the company adheres to the laws and their own regulations and problems get caught/corrected and they pass federal inspections every few years… the system isn’t perfect, though, but in general, I trust it, even having worked in the industry (I left that field 2 years ago, BTW).
Like I said, I think non-scored products probably are pretty much uniformally mixed, and the reason it isn’t recommended is that the companies simply never bothered to check and so can’t guarantee anything. Also, breaking a tablet that isn’t scored into two even pieces is really damn hard to do - that’s the biggest hurdle. A 100mg (total weight) tablet needs to break into two 50mg tablets pretty much every time…I don’t remember the acceptance criteria on it, but I’d guess that 47 and 53mg halves wouldn’t pass. I think breaking a scored tablet is intended to be done with a certain tool and not by hand, but I’m not certain of that.
Holy jesus people…they don’t mix pills individually in separate processes.
It all comes from the big tank of ingredients like flour/cakemix ect…
No “one” pill should ever exude anymore or less drugs in it from one side to the other.
Otherwise half the pills would be more less plecibo as the other half would be over strength with such crappy ass mixing practice.
This stuff is mixed with machinery and timed to such a degree that every pill will have the same context of ingredients.( by a tested percentage)
Timed pills/capsules and the like are designer pills and cannot be broken up into parts by virtue of what they were intended to be…TIMED, dispersal by layers.
It is silly to think one half of an asprin would have more or less junk in it than the other half. :dubious:
Beyond the fact that products made in the same factory can be of different quality and formulation, you will get variation even if the same thing is being built in two different locations. I worked at Winnebago(motor homes) for a while, and dealers would request units from the factory I worked in rather than another factory that was making identical units, since they found that ours had fewer issues upon delivery and lower maintenance needs. Simply put, the workers in one plant did a better job at making supposedly identical stuff, and the difference was measurable.