Simply put, the digestible capsules that the encapsulated medications come in for ingestions are made of something, and I seem to recall it’s an animal protien based gelatin.
So my questions are:
Am I correct in my memory of what those are made of?
If so, is the animal protien bovine, swine, ovine, or some other critter?
If it is swine, or, say, crab based, how do persons keeping Kosher, or following the dietary rules of Hallal, or other dietary restrictions based on religion or morality, deal with such medications?
(The things one considers when taking medications late at night…)
In my personal practice of keeping kosher, I don’t consider medicines to be food, so I don’t worry about this, even during Passover or on Yom Kippur.
Our Conservative rabbi holds with the opinion that gelatin as such has been so highly processed that it’s not really food any more, so we don’t need to make sure our food doesn’t have non-kosher gelatin in it. I like this ruling, because it implies that Jello isn’t food (something I’ve suspected for years).
Even the strictest observers of the kosher laws would take medicines for life-threatening conditions even if the medicines had non-kosher ingredients. Pikuach nefesh, or saving a life, is paramount in Jewish law. In fact, if you will die unless you take a medicine with (say) gelatin derived from pigs, Jewish law requires you to take the medicine rather than not taking it because it’s not kosher.
Anne Neville, thanks. That’s what I’d suspected would be the response from the keeping kosher kontingent (KKK ;j ). I know that pork is allowed, even endorsed, if that’s all that’s available to keep someone alive.
Yanno, I like that ruling, too. Jell-O is not food. Anyone who thinks it is has something seriously wrong in their mouth.
IANA;j , but from what I understand, it’s not that Jell-o itself is not food; it’s that at some point in the processing, it’s not food. That is to say, a dog will eat animal hooves, and a dog will eat Jell-o, but a dog will not eat the stuff the animal hooves is turned into at the rendering plant before it’s turned into Jell-o. At the point a dog won’t eat it, the material’s history becomes irrelevant as far as kashrut is concerned.
On the matter of pikuach nefesh, it is still correct, is it not, that if there is some equally-effective alternative which is Kosher, then that alternative would be required?
The word is spelled halal. I’ve heard of some Muslims calling companies to get their ingredients and drawing up long lists of exactly which toothpaste and everything has ingredients they don’t consider halal. Most Muslims are not that strict. They say after something has been processed into gelatin, it doesn’t count as the original substance any more, so no worries.
I was raised Conservative in an Orthodox shul, and I’m pretty sure gelatin in the form of Jello has always been nonkosher. Kashrut, in my book, is a little like sterile technique – once something has been contaminated, generally it is a hassle to uncontaminate it without a rabbi (barring certain home techniques that can be done on kitchen utensils and the like – boiling and burying in the ground and doing the things that unkashered a pot in reverse IIRC).
It explains the (large) market in kosher gelatin, aka agar, which I have mostly use for DNA electrophoresis and bacterial colonies. Another story.
As to the OP, the link adequately explains that meds are a gray area, as I was taught. Anything serious, it isn’t a question – take the meds, Jerry. But for a headache with known nonkosher pills, there are some issues.
BTW, even pig xenograft aortic valves and such are perfectly permissable if it is required to save your life.
The interesting thing, though, is the debates that you can get into about these things, especially with regards to saving a life. Is it OK to handle money to do it? If you can avoid certain things to keep the Sabbath/Passover/Kashruth, how much are you obligated to do it? etc. etc. A topic for another thread is what happens when you are on a desert island and the only thing around to eat is pigs. You are starving to death – do you eat the pigs? Now let’s complicate things – what if the only thing besides pigs to eat is your recently dead shipmate? IIRC, it works out that it is more preferable to eat the already dead human than to kill a pig. Not only that, but IIRC human meat is actually pareve so you could permissably make a human cheeseburger.
