It seems these days that most pills are packaged on strips in individual sealed-in bubbles, rather than coming loose in jars.
What I’d like to know is whether this is for preservative reasons and if there’s any danger in taking something like a non-prescription painkiller e.g. aspirin or paracetamol (acetaminophen) if the bubble holding it has been damaged. I’m talking about cases where it’s only been like that a few days or weeks such as if you puncture the bubble removing a neighboring pill, and the pills are kept in the box in a clean environment.
Also, if keeping the drugs fresh isn’t the reason for this, why is it done? I think I’ve heard somewhere that it prevents people taking overdoses by making it hard to get access to large numbers of pills, but 30 seconds work taking drugs from strips sounds rather a weak reason not to kill yourself.
IANAPharmacist!
Working as I do in the field of social work, though, I can tell you that 99% of my agency’s clients use bubble packs. The simplest reason is ease of use: the packs are basically a 7X4 array with Monday-Sunday on the vertical axis and Morning, Noon, Evening and Bedtime on the horizontal axis. This way, when it’s betime on Thursday, the patient can merely find the Thursday bedtime bubble, punch out his/her medicines, consume them, and be on his/her way.
Bubble packs are prinicpally used by people who are mentally incompetent to handle bottles (people with mental retardation/mental illness), people who are on several medications and who may have difficulty managing pills from several bottles (principally the elderly, but not necessarily so), and such.
I am not aware that they are used to preserve the medicines, but that may be an additional benefit. As to whether or not you can take a medicine if the bubble has been punctured… ask a real pharmacist.
These are typically known as blister packs, and they’re formed by compressing a foil covering to a plastic bubble, with the pill or capsule inside.
When I worked on packaging these drugs, we always had at least two blistering jobs going on at the same time. Loose pills were less common - perhaps one job at any given time.
The use of the blister packs is a bit double edged, though. Yes, it’s easier to see if the drug has been tainted (accidentally or not), but there are now extra elements that can be tainted: the bubble and the foil.
Measures are taken during the packaging process to prevent this; when the packs come off the machine, each one is examined very carefully by hand to see if any marks or holes have occurred. If such discrepancies occur, the machine is stopped until the problem is solved. Also, every fifteen minutes or so a test is performed - two sample strips are taken from the line and dunked in a bowl of water. Then a dye is added, and the strips are further examined under a magnifying glass.
You can’t really do any of that with loose pills, of course. If one pill in a jar is bad - discolored, for example - then the safe assumption is that the entire jar is bad. But if one pill in a strip (of four, six, etc.) is bad, then it’s a fairly simple task to check the other strips.
I always thought it was for childproofing. Once an adult broke the seal on a bottle kids could get the pills pretty readily. With the bubbles all the pills are neatly locked away until ready for use.
As for the elderly finding these easier than bottles… I always had to take all the pills out of the blister packs and place them in bottles for Grandma as her arthritis kept her from being able to open the little bubbles. Even the bottles were difficult if they had any childproofing at all on them.
Also they generally only use bubble packs OTC for stuff that comes in relatively small quantities. The value packs of claritin only contain a months supply. Some of the boxes only have enough for a few days. You never see 500 count bubble packs. If you are going to make a package for 12 pills … you want people to feel like they are buying something bigger. And you don’t want them to rattle a bottle that feels mostly empty. So from a marketing standpoint blister packs help in this regard too.
Blister-packs also make it difficult for wackos to adulterate medications which they then put back on the store shelves. (Remember Extra-Strength Tylenol?)