Forgetting your pills? : Easy way to prevent

This is a common issue every one of us has experienced plenty of times in our lifetime, be it with a short course dosing regimen or regular dosage of medicines. We have forgotten to take our pills not a few times but many. So relatable, right? Missing a dose can have a huge impact on your health as the cycle of the mechanism of functioning of medicine is disturbed. You might not recover from an infection, your pain might get exacerbated, your blood pressure might shoot up or you might throw up any minute depending on which undergoing medicine you miss.

Sometimes, the case is just the other way around. You simply forget whether you have taken medicines or not. In such case, you might overdose yourself repeating the medicine. If so, you are likely to experience side effects on a greater intensity, in some cases; the condition can be fatal too. So as medicine takers, we shall be supremely responsible for ourselves so that we do not miss our dose at any cost. Still, being caught up with work or even just casually, we forget. Though there are manual techniques like noting down in your diary that you have taken a pill, you can still forget to do this tedious work, can’t you? There are pill organizers or pill reminder containers too, but I find them a bit skeptical to use from a sterility and storage point of view; if their cleanliness is well maintained or if they are airtight enough.

It was one of the beginning days of my first work in a hospital pharmacy; I came across the packaging of two different medicines with week day’s demarcation. It got me thinking for a while and took me quite a few minutes to figure it out.

Well, this packaging technique is certainly a big help to prevent missing doses. However, this got me thinking. It is fine if a medicine has to be taken once or twice a day, but, what if a patient has to take the same medicine multiple times a day? What is the new packaging idea that we can come up with for those medicines so that sterility is not compromised? Any idea?