Do meds expire?

[Guest guest]

An article I got some time ago that bears reading.

David Molony

 

 

DO MEDICATIONS REALLY EXPIRE?

Try An Experiment With Your Mother-In-Law

By Richard Altschuler

 

Does the expiration date on a bottle of a medication mean anything? If a

bottle of Tylenol, for example, says something like " Do not use after June

1998, "

and it is August 2002, should you take the Tylenol? Should you discard it? Can

you get hurt if you take it? Will it simply have lost its potency and do you

no good?

 

In other words, are drug manufacturers being honest with us when they put an

expiration date on their medications, or is the practice of dating just

another drug industry scam, to get us to buy new medications when the old ones

that

purportedly have " expired " are still perfectly good?

 

These are the pressing questions I investigated after my mother-in-law

recently said to me, " It doesn't mean anything, " when I pointed out that the

Tylenol

she was about to take had " expired " 4 years and a few months ago. I was a bit

mocking in my pronouncement -- feeling superior that I had noticed the

chemical corpse in her cabinet -- but she was equally adamant in her reply, and

is

generally very sage about medical issues.

 

So I gave her a glass of water with the purportedly " dead " drug, of which she

took 2 capsules for a pain in the upper back. About a half hour later she

reported the pain seemed to have eased up a bit. I said " You could be having a

placebo effect, " not wanting to simply concede she was right about the drug, and

also not actually knowing what I was talking about. I was just happy to hear

that her pain had eased, even before we had our evening cocktails and hot tub

dip (we were in " Leisure World, " near Laguna Beach, California, where the hot

tub is bigger than most Manhattan apartments, and " Heaven, " as generally

portrayed, would be raucous by comparison).

 

Upon my return to NYC and high-speed connection, I immediately scoured the

medical databases and general literature for the answer to my question about

drug expiration labeling. And voila, no sooner than I could say " Screwed again

by

the pharmaceutical industry, " I had my answer. Here are the simple facts:

 

First, the expiration date, required by law in the United States, beginning

in 1979, specifies only the date the manufacturer guarantees the full potency

and safety of the drug -- it does not mean how long the drug is actually " good "

or safe to use. Second, medical authorities uniformly say it is safe to take

drugs past their expiration date -- no matter how " expired " the drugs

purportedly are. Except for possibly the rarest of exceptions, you won't get

hurt and

you certainly won't get killed. A contested example of a rare exception is a

case of renal tubular damage purportedly caused by expired tetracycline

(reported by G. W. Frimpter and colleagues in JAMA, 1963;184:111). This outcome

(disputed by other

scientists) was supposedly caused by a chemical transformation of the active

ingredient. Third, studies show that expired drugs may lose some of their

potency over time, from as little as 5% or less to 50% or more (though usually

much less than the latter). Even 10 years after the " expiration date, " most

drugs

have a good deal of their original potency. So wisdom dictates that if your

life does depend on an expired drug, and you must have 100% or so of its

original strength, you should probably toss it and get a refill, in accordance

with

the cliché, " better safe than sorry. " If your life does not depend on an

expired drug -- such as that for headache, hay fever, or menstrual cramps --

take

it and see what happens.

 

One of the largest studies ever conducted that supports the above points

about " expired drug " labeling was done by the US military 15 years ago,

according

to a feature story in the Wall Street Journal (March 29, 2000), reported by

Laurie P. Cohen. The military was sitting on a $1 billion stockpile of drugs and

facing the daunting process of destroying and replacing its supply every 2 to

3 years, so it began a testing program to see if it could extend the life of

its inventory. The testing, conducted by the US Food and Drug Administration

(FDA), ultimately covered more than 100 drugs, prescription and

over-the-counter. The results showed that about 90% of them were safe and

effective as far as

15 years past their original expiration date.

 

In light of these results, a former director of the testing program, Francis

Flaherty, said he concluded that expiration dates put on by manufacturers

typically have no bearing on whether a drug is usable for longer. Mr. Flaherty

noted that a drug maker is required to prove only that a drug is still good on

whatever expiration date the company chooses to set. The expiration date doesn't

mean, or even suggest, that the drug will stop being effective after that,

nor that it will become harmful. " Manufacturers put expiration dates on for

marketing, rather than scientific, reasons, " said Mr. Flaherty, a pharmacist at

the FDA until his retirement in 1999. " It's not profitable for them to have

products on a shelf for 10 years. They want turnover. "

 

The FDA cautioned there isn't enough evidence from the program, which is

weighted toward drugs used during combat, to conclude most drugs in consumers'

medicine cabinets are potent beyond the expiration date. Joel Davis, however, a

former FDA expiration-date compliance chief, said that with a handful of

exceptions -- notably nitroglycerin, insulin, and some liquid antibiotics --

most

drugs are probably as durable as those the agency has tested for the military.

" Most drugs degrade very slowly, " he said. " In all likelihood, you can take a

product you have at home and keep it for many years, especially if it's in the

refrigerator. " Consider aspirin. Bayer AG puts 2-year or 3-year dates on

aspirin and says that it should be discarded after that. However, Chris Allen, a

vice president at the Bayer unit that makes aspirin, said the dating is " pretty

conservative " ; when Bayer has tested 4-year-old aspirin, it remained 100%

effective, he said. So why doesn't Bayer set a 4-year expiration date? Because

the

company often changes packaging, and it undertakes " continuous improvement

programs, " Mr. Allen said. Each change triggers a need for more expiration-date

testing, and testing each time for a 4-year life would be impractical. Bayer

has never tested aspirin beyond 4 years, Mr. Allen said. But Jens Carstensen

has. Dr. Carstensen, professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin's

pharmacy school, who wrote what is considered the main text on drug stability,

said,

" I did a study of different aspirins, and after 5 years, Bayer was still

excellent. Aspirin, if made correctly, is very stable.

 

Okay, I concede. My mother-in-law was right, once again. And I was wrong,

once again, and with a wiseacre attitude to boot. Sorry mom. Now I think I'll

take a swig of the 10-year dead package of Alka Seltzer in my medicine chest --

to ease the nausea I'm feeling from calculating how many billions of dollars

the pharmaceutical industry bilks out of unknowing consumers every year who

discard perfectly good drugs and buy new ones because they trust the industry's

" expiration date labeling. "

 

Reprinted with permission of Redflagsdaily

2003

 

Thomas A. M. Kramer, MD, Associate Professor of Psychiatry, University of

Chicago, Chicago, Illinois

 

 

 

 

[Guest guest]

Interesting article thanks, Wonder if that would apply to

Homeopathic medicine as well ?

 

Ed Kasper L.Ac., Santa Cruz, CA.

[Guest guest]

Posted by: " Ed Kasper LAc " <A HREF= " eddy?Subject=

Re%3A%20Do%20meds%20expire%3F " >eddy </A> <A

HREF= " http://profiles./happyherbalist2001 " >happyherbalist2001 </A>

 

Wed Oct 11, 2006 8:46 am (PST) Interesting article thanks, Wonder if that

would apply to

Homeopathic medicine as well ?

 

Ed Kasper L.Ac., Santa Cruz, CA.

 

 

 

The oldest city in the USA, St. Augustine, Florida had a medical kit in the

museum containing homeopathic remedies. The remedies were tested and shown to

still be effective even though they were from the Civil war era. They were

tested by someone with symptoms taking some of them and the symptoms cleared up.

That was in 1986.

 

Best,

Sunny