My pharmacy recently was no longer able to get the blister pack version of my medicine. Instead it’s in a bottle. I was told that the reason why was that older people preferred the bottles.
I, on the other hand, preferred the packs. They had the days of the week on them, making it easy to keep track if I accidentally missed a dose.
Given that this board skews older, I thought I’d check here to see. And I’ll also delineate by age. Note, I’m not calling you “old” if you are over 50: it just seemed like the obvious number to use to get a decent number of people over that age.
Bottles are much easier to deal with. And they’re cheaper.
When you’re taking 10 - 12 pills a day, you don’t open them one at a time, anyway – once a week you fill each compartment of a 7-days container with that day’s pills. So you can still see if you missed a day, but it’s much easier to take all of them.
Bottles. I’m only a week shy of thirty, but I have nerve damage in my hands that makes the blister packs that one of my meds comes in almost impossible to open.
If you need the days of the week on, you can always buy one of those pill separator cases. They’re like a dollar or two.
I hate blister packs, especially when the pill is smaller than a grain of rice.
By the way, what exactly does a modern pharmacist do, besides (after telling you to come back in two hours) take a sealed labeled package of drugs and put them in a bag and staple it shut with eight computer-printed pages of warnings printed on one side only.
I guess I have a mild preference for a bottle because I find it slightly easier to keep all of the pills in one place if they’re in a single bottle vs. multiple blister pack sheets.
If all of the pills were in one mega blister pack, then it might be a toss-up.
We have no choice in the UK, as far as I’m aware. Everything comes in blister packs, I assume as a safety measure (certainly that’s why you can’t buy large quantities of over the country non-prescription painkillers, for instance).
Blister packs allow left over drugs to be reused, like passed on to charities. At present, anything NOT in a blister pack MUST be destroyed.
After caring for someone at end of life, when they are on a lot of scripts, many of which get changed up in the last weeks, I discovered you are often left with piles of perfectly usable, expensive drugs. All must be destroyed. That’s pretty wasteful, considering there are places in the world where people are dying due to lack of such medications.
Bottles are easier to open. I’ll take the blister packs though, so I never again have to face such a shocking waste of a lifesaving resource.
I take a handfull of pills in the morning [8 prescription pills, 2 nonprescription pills, 1 injection and 1 8g strip of goop rubbed into my back] so I dispense my pill bottles into a pill carrier [it has 4 compartments per day, I medicate at 0500, 0100, 1700 and 2100] For some 5 or 10 minutes once per week I sort out the weeks pills. If I had to sit there and multiple times per day open bottles or pop out punchpacks I would go nuts.
For a while I did use pillpack and loved it but Tricare decided they did not want to cover it. sigh
The notion that blister packs are easier because they have the days of the week on them* might make sense if you’re just taking one or two pills.
More than that, and it’s easier just to load up a pill minder once a week. If it’s Tuesday morning, I take the pills in the Tuesday morning compartment of my pill minder.
*That’s a new one to me. The blister packs I’ve seen don’t have any such guidance, just a hassle to get to a pill.
I am nearly in the state that Arquvan describes. I take 5 pills with breakfast and 3 with dinner. I have two of those 28 pill holders and I use them to prepare a 4 week supply. I detest blister packs. Fortunately only one of my pills come that way. It is a tiny pill (could be called grain of rice size) one of 20 splits in half when I push it out. There was another one that used to that was so hard to push out that I had to take scissors to it. But I think of blister packs as small torture devices. Along with impossible to open bottles. Fortunately, my pharmacist gives me regular opening bottles. I had to sign some release for that. But with the arthritis in my thumbs I just could not cope.
There was another one I used to take that came in a 28 pill pack, while my prescription was for 30. So the pharmacist had to scissor two pills out of another pack and add them to the box. Since 30 days scripts are standard here, I was doubtless not the only one.
I’m 46, I take 5 pills each morning and 2 pills each evening, and I prefer bottles. I have no problems with my hands/arthritis. I live alone and I keep forgetting to ask the pharmacy to stop giving me child-proof caps, so I leave the lids off the morning bottles (on a shelf in my home office) and have the lids just loosely resting on the evening bottles (on my coffee table). Though every other Tuesday evening I put all of the lids on tight and move the bottles to a cupboard, so the cleaning ladies don’t disturb/have to deal with them the next day.
Bottles. I have several dailies and use a couple pill sticks to keep sure of everything. Bottles are just a lot easier on Tuesday nights when I refill the sticks.
I hate blister packs as they are getting increasingly hard to open. At one time the pill simply pushed out the thin foil backing, but now while you can still get them out with a lot of force, they really require tools to open.
But I do agree that the day of the week might come in handy, but I’ve not see that.
If I’m actually taking something, I prefer bottles because it’s less mess, and you don’t get those stubborn blister packs which just won’t open unless you get a knife and cut, or fracture the pill when you finally do force them open.
I’m 33, memory is not a problem, and I’m good at routinizing medication so I know that if it’s early morning, I’m due for whatever I’m taking. If that stops being the case, I’ll buy a pill minder, which pretty well requires a bottle for convenient use.
I’d be fine with blister packs if they didn’t require scissors to open, but those are increasingly rare. This is a MAJOR annoyance if you want to carry a few doses of something in your pocket or in your car. Either you put the bare pill into some other small container so it doesn’t get lost or broken, or you carry the blister pack and hope you can get it open when you need it. There’s nothing like struggling to get an Imodium tablet out of its Fort-Knox-like packaging while you’re feeling sick as a dog.
I ordered some OTC medication from an eBay seller in India, and was delighted when it arrived in easily-opened foil packs (like this) instead of blister packs. I don’t know why foil packaging isn’t used more in the USA; is it because they’re deemed insufficiently tamper-proof?
