Why are potassium tablets now only available at the pharmacy counter?
(No prescription needed, though!)
It’s a dietary supplement. I don’t get it.
When I asked the pharmacist, he seemed irritated! His first response was, “If you take too much, it can upset the stomach!” So I asked, “Like Aspirin?”
His next response was, “If you take too much it can kill you!” So I asked, “Like Tylenol?”
Then he said, quite miffed now, “It’s much worse!”
When I asked how being dead from too much potassium was ‘worse’ than being dead from too much Tylenol? He just stormed back to his counter!
I assume, if it were a new regulation, he’d have just said so, and I would not have had any more questions.
When I got home I googled it to see but found no info at all, about any change.
So, what’s going on? It’s not like you can get high or cook meth with it! Why the change?
Potassium can kill you? So can too much sodium, and the LD50 for each (as chloride) is about the same (the RDA for potassium is also about 50% higher, with recommendations to get even more), so if that were a reason to regulate potassium supplements, then table salt would be regulated just the same. There was a previous thread not long ago on the same subject, about the size of potassium supplements (something like 100 mg, when recommendations for optimal health are in the 4,700 mg range and most people get only half that).
Maybe potassium is used to make some illegal drugs (not that I can find)?
I posted about potassium supplements not too long ago, and the consensus seemed to be that the reason why they provide so little potassium (far less than salt substitute) is because if you really work at it or have other health problems too much potassium can kill you.
Don’t know about your local pharmacy, but why not order them from drugstore.com (or another etail sight)? Drugstore.com has 100 595mg tablets for $3.99.
I checked that other thread and according to the links provided it takes 3700mg of potassium per kilogram of body weight to be fatal, if I read that right.
Tylenol overdose is a serious problem, the maximum dose is 4000mg, yet it’s still available over the counter.
My great-grandmother almost died from a potassium overdose. She was taking a multivitamin plus a separate potassium supplement daily. That might sound excessive,but I do the same thing with calcium. I suppose lots of people don’t realize that too much of a good thing can be a bad thing.
I don’t see where this is true in the USA, nor even for all Potassium supplements in all of Canada. Do you have a link or a cite? Or maybe it’s just your pharmacy mis-reading something?
I literally (in the truest sense of the word) just walked into a pharmacy in Chicago and picked up a bottle of potassium supplements off the shelf, so this isn’t universal, at least.
Nope, she was very healthy for her age. They only discovered the high potassium levels when she fell and broke her hip at 86 and was rushed to the ER. Otherwise, she only took two prescription pills and she had an asthma inhaler. To the best of my knowledge, she was just taking too much potassium.