Drug expiration : Is it important?

Описание: Recently I woke up in the middle of the night with severe heartburn, when I reached out to my medicine cabinet to get my PPI pill, which is a strong antacid medication, I found out that it was recently expired. A very frequent question that is regularly asked. does this pill really work on the day before expiration and will it not work the following day? also, will this pill be harmful to your body if you take it?

The above scenario is very common among a lot of people. So, do we really have to throw the medication after its expiration date? According to Harvard medical school publication, they talked about a study conducted by the FDA, Food and drug administration, at the request of the US military, this study was about drugs expiration date. The whole reason for it was, to find out if they have to get rid of their large stockpile of their drugs past their expiration.
or they can continue to use them in order to save money.

In conclusion, they found out that 90% of more than 100 drugs in this study, weather they are prescription or over the counter drugs, they were perfectly good and remain potent and effective to be used even 15 years after the expiration date.

So, the expiration date does not mean, that at this point the medication is no longer effective. or it is unsafe and harmful to your body. In fact, it might mean that this medicine may or maybe not, lose some of its effectiveness over time. But it will NOT harm your body. It is well known that keeping medicines in the fridge might also help the drugs to remain potent for many years.
In my opinion, some important critical drugs
can be excluded from the above discussion especially, when it is very crucial, to get the full effectiveness of the medicine. Some examples of these drugs are, nitroglycerin for angina, Insulin, antibiotics and anti-seizure medications.

So, the decision is yours, next time if you find yourself in this situation and your medicine expired few years ago and it is important that, it should be 100% effective, then maybe you need to get a new one. On the other hand, if this medicine expired few weeks before, I think in my opinion and I personally do this, I can take this medication without hesitation.

Video shot by Galia Helbaoui and edited by Amer Helbaoui