3mo ago

Preference

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My poor european mind cannot understand the industrial bottle of 1000 ibuprofen tablets for a household.
Here they sell you packs of 20 tablets or something like that.
- Well but you do get health care with that, so instead of treating symptoms with ever larger doses of increasingly potent painkillers you have hopes of a more structural solution.
- Would you rather buy 15 pills for $15 or 500 pills for the same price? That's why we buy the mega bottles.
  
  Well I can buy a pack of 16 in Tesco for £0.39
  So we're actually paying pretty close to the same amount per pill, just in smaller packs.
  
  More packaging waste though
  
  Technically... But there's also a lot of waste from the 500 pack that people throw out half of. It likely evens out.
  
  I don't think there are many people just chucking pills out. 1000 isn't much if it's your go-to pain relief.
  Ibuprofen solid tablets take about 5 years to expire (they are also pretty safe to eat expired as well, just might be less effective). So you have to have about 4 a week on average, which is well wihin safe limits even for a single person (and these are more for families).
  As an example usecase If you have 3 menstrators in your household that take 4 a day 3 days a month (daily safe max is meant to be 6x200mg tablets) then that's ~450 a year and you'll be using them up more than quick enough to not throw any out, and that's just dealing with cramps alone. Throw in someone with back pain, the occasional headache and sprained ankle, etc, and you can see how quickly a big family could go through them.
  Personally I don't quite go through them that quick (I use roughly 100 a year) but if my household was 1 bigger it would make sense for me too.
  
  Reading this thread, I kinda feel weird.
  When I was a child, I use to take tablets for headache (no idea which ones. I was a child.) and almost every time, the headache came back more intense than before, when the effect wore off.
  Later, I started understanding that headaches (and other pains) happen for a reason and it is better to find out the reason and fix it, than just turn off the alarm.
  So now, even if I get hurt due to something, I say no to pain relievers. This has even saved me from re-injuring a previous injury a few times.
  Sprained ankle / back pain : exercise and yoga.
  Cramps from exercise: next time do proper stretching after exercise.
  menstruation: I have no idea. never had that. sorry. But I can say for sure, people around me don't tend to resort to taking pills all the time. Even those that have it hard.
  broke a ligament: definitely don't take a pill, or you won't realise if you are about to break it again.
  Over here, pain management pills seems more like a last resort and not to be used for something that happens regularly. So, reading about it being treated like cereal, feels pretty weird.
  
  I have a bit of an alternative, I used to get headaches a lot as a child, the meds absolutely helped as usually I'd take them so I could sleep it off, which almost always did clear it up.
  I'm not sure why I was so frequently having headaches, but it definitely dropped off a lot once I moved out and started my own life, now it's only maybe once or twice a month.
  
  I believe individually packaged tablets actually do help reduce overdoses because you can't just chug the whole bottle in one go. Yes it's more wasteful but it does save lives.
  
  Is... Is that a thing that actually happens?
  
  Yeah, afraid so
  
  They go bad, though? At least my nice white aspirin pills start crumbling and visibly yellowing after a few months. There's no way me or even an entire family could swallow 500 until then.
- The shocking part is, the whole bottle is like $2.
- When you buy a bottle of 1000 for around 15 bucks, and it lasts you a decade.... Amazing!
  
  Ibuprofen probably isn’t stable for a decade. Then again, apparently no one knows for sure! Studies pick an arbitrary amount of time to test and then call that the shelf life if it remains usable. So far it doesn’t seem anyone has had the patience to test the absolute shelf life of ibuprofen
  
  My laymen understanding is they slowly break down and become less effective but not dangerous or negative.
- Advil is the main brand name for this. I always buy a bottle and other pills when I'm in the US. It is way more than I need but what I like is all the US pills look different. I always have a little mixed bottle of Advil, Pepto Bismol (fixes everything stomach related), anti-histamine pills... with me for when I need them. You can mix them all together and still tell the difference between them. That's what I don't like about the European blister packs of unidentifable white pills. That and I hate blister packs. It is also cheaper to buy a bottle. But to be clear, I get like a bottle of 50 or 100. Advil is also enteric coated so it is better for your stomach and tastes better (it's slightly sweet).
  
  That sounds horrible, haha
  If it works for you, great, but I'd be super sceptical of the Skittles jar of mixed pills. At least with blister packs you get the drug and dosage printed on the back
  
  The typical dosage is 2 for all of them (excluding the rand german pill - the one that you have no idea what it is). It's also ibuprofen, but you would never know it. Does that help at all with you being skeptical?
- Came here to say the same thing, like WTF, why would you need a jar of 500
  
  Because some of us have had a headache since 1986.
- But the blister packs we get can’t be tampered with 🤷‍♂️
  
  The bottles in the US also have safety seals for the same reason
  
  There's a tamper-proof seal on the bottle
- Here in the UK you can't buy more than two packs at a given time...
  
  You also have to have a license for tv…
  
  For live TV, perhaps they should change its name to subscription because that's basically what it is at the end of the day.
- They probably sell them in centimeters or some shit.

112 comments