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Comment by kristofferR | Hacker News Reader

Cool project, but the issue is rather that the US has pill bottles at all. Pretty scary, especially for overdoseable drugs. Other places have moved on blister packs a long time ago.

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Isn't that kind of horrible for the environment? The vast majority of pills do not need individual packaging.

What are the benefits for blister packs except overdose protection? Are they recyclable like pill bottles? One of the reasons US uses pill bottles is pharmacies, where pharmacists fill in any amount of pills needed in a bottle, e.g. if you need just 3 pills of really strong pain killer, you get a bottle with three pills. As far as I remember blister packs packaged in a factory and not customizable.

Personally, I use habit tracking app to check in every night to mark I took my pills.

Where I live pharmacies cut blisters with scissors

I significantly prefer blister packs over pill bottles. Blister packs are easier to travel with. They take up less space in my medical cabinet. I can see how many pills I have left without looking inside of an opaque container. I actually would feel safer if my pills were packaged in a factory by a machine than at a pharmacy by a human.

I much prefer pill bottles, i find blisters to be fiddly, especially when they add the paper on top that needs to be peeled off before i can push the pill through the foil (i mean why would they do this)

> especially when they add the paper on top that needs to be peeled off before I can push the pill through the foil

Oh this drives me _nuts_. I ended up keeping a small Leatherman knife in the bathroom to slice through the paper/foil in the middle of the pack and peel the covering to each side.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I'm not even sure how blister packs help protect against accidental overdose beyond the protection you'd get from just counting the pills in the bottle. In either case, you could accidentally skip a day and double dose later on based on the number of pills remaining, especially if you aren't sure what day you started taking the medication. I can definitely see the benefit of a product that doesn't rely on user reporting to track doses.

The point as I understand/was taught it in school is that the time it would take you to pop out enough* e.g. paracetamol to do really serious lasting harm (vs. 'just' being quite sick or needing stomach pumped) gives a sort of 'cool-down' or re-evaluation period, or requires significant planning, whereas a bottle can be downed impulsively.

(* and that if you're taking them as you go, you'll probably be physically incapable/less inclined to continue far enough after a certain point)

Ah, I hadn't even thought of that, but it makes sense. It certainly can't hurt!

Blister packs are commonly used in the US as well - especially for OTC or brand name products. They aren't commonly used by pharmacist/chemists by default. But all the big chain pharmacies now offer blister-pack services to large multi-pill regimens - usually at no additional cost. For example, CVS calls this SimpleDose.

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