Have you ruined your medicine? Are your heart pills ineffective? Is your anti-seizure drug almost worthless? Have your birth control pills lost their punch?
Heat and humidity are the enemies and unless you are careful, your medicine could lose potency.
How Heat Poses Danger for Your Medicine and You:
Margaret had a nasty cough that wouldn’t go away. Finally, in desperation, she went to her physician who gave her a prescription for a powerful new antibiotic. Margaret was flabbergasted by the price. Because Margaret has trouble swallowing pills he offered her a specially compounded liquid formula which was outrageously expensive.
She figured it was worthwhile if the medicine could clear up the infection in her lungs. The pharmacist stuck a label on the bottle reminding her to store the medicine in the refrigerator. But before Margaret could get home and put it away she ran a few other errands.
While she went to have her hair done she left the medicine in the car. The temperature soared to well over 100 degrees and the antibiotic began to deteriorate.
Margaret’s cough did not get better, even with the antibiotic treatment. There’s no way to tell if the trouble she had getting rid of her bronchitis was due to the heat damage done to her medication. Her cough might have been caused by a viral infection that wouldn’t have responded to any antibiotic. However, there’s no doubt that allowing her medicine to sit in a hot car undermined its effectiveness.
Don’t Leave Your Medicine in the Car:
A hot car holds danger for your medicine as well as for your children or your pets. Anyone who leaves medication on the seat or in the glove compartment at this time of year could be wasting money and inviting trouble. Not only might the chemical ingredients begin to decompose, they might be converted to toxic byproducts.
Even if you don’t allow your medicine to overheat in an automobile, that doesn’t mean you are home free. Ultraviolet rays from the sun can also harm some medicine.
Be Wary of Free Samples:
Free samples provided by a physician may also be suspect during the summer. Sales representatives from pharmaceutical companies usually supply doctors with these freebies.
We’re all for giving people a sample to determine if the medication will work or cause intolerable side effects. But we do worry about samples that have ridden around in the trunk of a salesperson’s car from one doctor’s office to another.
Some companies require that the reps use cooler chests to store samples, but there are no uniform standards and the Food and Drug Administration does not supervise shipping or storage.
What About Mail Order Medicines?
Mail order pharmacy services are also vulnerable to climatic conditions. No one likes to talk about this dirty little secret, especially the major insurance companies that now require many clients to purchase their drugs via mail order. But consider this: neither the United States Postal Service nor parcel delivery services have refrigerated trucks. Consequently, many medications shipped during the hot months may be exposed to dangerously high levels of heat and humidity. This holds a danger for your medicine.
Most prescription medicines call for storage at room temperature (68 to 77 degrees F). Temporary fluctuations ranging from 59 to 86 degrees are considered acceptable.
Most delivery vehicles well exceed that on a hot day. Just ask your UPS driver how hot it gets in the back of the big brown truck. We are willing to bet that many USPS delivery vehicles also reach 100 degrees or higher during the summer. By the way, this problem also applies to deliveries to wholesalers, pharmacies and health food stores.
From a Hot Truck to a Roasting Mailbox:
But wait, the problem doesn’t end with the delivery truck. If the mailman puts your medicine in a mailbox it is likely to sit there for hours. In that hot metal box the temperature could soar to over 120 degrees or more. In some cases that poses serious danger for your medicine.
Not all drugs are sensitive to deterioration during shipping. But you will have no way of knowing whether the pills you remove from your hot mailbox this summer retain the same potency they had when they left the factory. Storing your pills on a kitchen table or window sill where sunlight can reach them may also be a danger for your medicine.
Is the Medicine Chest a Safe Spot to Store Your Drugs?
And if you think you will be safe putting the bottle in the medicine chest, think again. This is about the worst place in the house because the heat and humidity from your shower can ruin medicine. Pill bottles are not air tight so moisture can work its way in and speed deterioration.
Ask your pharmacist about proper drug storage, especially for heart pills, antibiotics, epilepsy medications and all liquid medicines. If you are required to buy via mail order, contact the company and ask about the effect of shipping on shelf life.
In our opinion, the FDA, the pharmaceutical industry and mail order pharmacies have not addressed this issue adequately. If medications are supposed to be stored at temperatures between 68 and 77 degrees, why allow drugs to be shipped during the summer when everyone knows these guidelines will be violated for hours or even days at a time?
