Can you break capsules in half

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A conversation about reducing the harms of social media. Menopause and memory: Know the facts. How to get your child to put away toys. Is a common pain reliever safe during pregnancy? Men's Health When is it okay to split medication in half? January 1, Replace a splitter when it no longer divides pills easily and accurately.

Find out which one performed best in our recent test of pill splitters. Split pills one at a time. Some pills deteriorate when exposed to air, heat, or moisture after being split. So cut a pill just before you take it, then take the other half as your next dose. That helps ensure that you compensate for any deviation in size. And split pills in half—not into smaller portions, such as quarters.

When in doubt, ask your doctor or pharmacist to show you how to do it properly. There is no official, complete list of medicines that can be split.

But it is usually okay to split drugs that treat:. But some drugs should never be split. For example, the pain medicine oxycodone OxyContin is released over time in the body. If you split it, you could get an overdose. These materials were made possible by a grant from the state Attorney General Consumer and Prescriber Education Grant Program, which is funded by a multistate settlement of consumer fraud claims regarding the marketing of the prescription drug Neurontin gabapentin.

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You can also show support by liking us on Facebook and following us on Twitter. Sign In. Become a Member. I know someone who spilled the contents of a pill on the floor and the dog got it. Pill splitting works best when a pill with double the dosage costs the same as one with half as much, says pharmacist Marilyn Stebbins, who runs an educational cost-saving clinic in Sacramento.

Anyone planning to cut pills in half should invest in a pill splitter, experts say. Some pills are scored down the middle with a straight, indented line that makes them easier to split. Tomaka adds that pills should be split one at a time and that the remaining half should be taken the following day rather than splitting an entire bottle at once.

In , the Food and Drug Administration began requiring manufacturing companies to label medication with an expiration date. Some pills have expiration dates lasting two years, but most new medications are good for about one year.

The primary concern with expired medications is that they may have lost their potency, not that they may have turned toxic, Stebbins says. An exception, she notes, can be liquid medication or gelcaps, in which the product could potentially develop mold or become rancid, especially if left open or stored improperly. Expiration dates are somewhat controversial. Some experts suspect that drug companies have used them as a way to sell more products; Soller notes that the staying power of some over-the-counter medications used to be a selling point for manufacturers.