Feb. 18, 2018 – Hello, all! One of the main objectives I have for this blog is to educate you about stuff that you just don’t have time to look up on your own time, but will benefit you in your daily life and help Mother Earth at the same time! (Disclaimer! I’m looking up the resources and passing them on to you, not doing the RESEARCH myself)
Medicines! How “expired” is expired? I found an article that uses research done by our military program when they were faced with replacing thousands of dollars of medication every few years. What they found from the study is 90% of more than 100 drugs, both prescription and over-the-counter, were perfectly good to use even 15 years after the expiration date. That’s GOOD NEWS! Excluding nitroglycerin, insulin, and liquid antibiotics, most medications are as long-lasting as the ones tested by the military. Read the whole article here. It’s short and interesting. I’d likely still have lots of bottles of ibuprofen if I’d known this sooner…ah, well!
What about disposing of medicines? I think we all grew up with our parents disposing of meds by flushing them down the toilet…until such time that common knowledge taught us that we were poisoning the water supply this way. Hindsight’s 20/20… so now what do we do with them? I found some guidance here about how to recycle/dispose of them. Ideally, we’d like to take them to our local take-back centers and let them deal with them en masse.
If you’re lucky, you know someone who takes meds to developing countries on mission trips. Another example of good deeds that give our cast-offs second life and purpose!
I hope you found something useful from this post, I SURE DID and I wrote it:)
