I have some medication bottles with timers built into the lids that automatically tell you how long it’s been since you last took a dose (opened the lid), and these things are so convenient I’m actually kind of stunned they’re not more common.
You don’t have to go through the whole rigamarole of “wait, did I just take my meds five minutes ago, or did I just think about doing it? … great, should I maybe miss a dose or maybe take a double dose?” every other time you take them. You don’t have to try to remember what time it was when you woke up in the middle of the night and groped around for the bottle and took the next dose and fell back asleep. If you’re taking more than one medication, you don’t have to keep track of which you took when. And of course doing all that when you’re sedated or have a fever or are just in pain is extra fun.
Plus: pediatric medicines. When I or any of my siblings got sick as babies, my parents used to write up a chart on the whiteboard, every time, with medications and dosages and times. Because they’d be switching off taking care of us, and it would just be way too easy for Mom to give the baby something that Dad had just given them ten minutes before but not thought to mention (and with a baby, that can be pretty dangerous). With timer-caps, you’ve got perfect information-sharing: you don’t just know what’s the last time you gave the baby the medication, you know what’s the last time the medication was used.
So it really seems like this should be more of a thing! I mean, ordering them online cost me a couple of bucks each; so if the manufacturers were just building in timers by default, what should that actually add to the price, maybe a quarter for each bottle? A dollar at the outside? That’s definitely within the store brand – name brand variation for even cheap over-the-counter medications. I’d happily pay fifty cents extra to buy a bottle of advil off the shelf at the grocery store that had a timer built into the lid to count out four-to-six-hours for me.
At the very least, I’m kind of surprised that this isn’t a default feature on, like, prescription painkillers. My parents did the whiteboard thing again for me after I had jaw surgery, because I was on the good drugs and in no condition to keep track of whether I’d had a dose recently or not. I strongly suspect that having a timer that set itself automatically – so that even someone pretty drugged up could look at it and see if it had reached 6:00:00 and turned green – would make a nontrivial difference in the rate of accidental overdoses. And given how much those drugs cost, adding a dollar timer to the lid is completely insignificant.
So I’d really expect consumers to be demanding these for the convenience, federal regulations to be pushing them for safety, and drug manufacturers to be happily showing them off as a “check out the cool fancy bonus gadget our brand has, because we care.” And yet as far as I know this happens literally zero – you can buy the timer lids online, if you know they exist, but no medication I’ve ever seen is just sold in bottles that have timer lids by default.
Tags:
#… #interesting idea #the more you know #remind me to get some of these #(right now I’m only on iron pills) #(where it doesn’t really matter if you skip a day or two) #(so when I’m not sure if I’ve taken any today I just don’t take it and it’s not a big deal) #(but I expect at *some* point in my life I’ll be on important-timing meds for *some* length of time) #(I was going to use one of those pillboxes with separate divisions for each day of the week) #(but that gets rapidly less helpful with anything more complicated than once-a-day)
Brinens and Things 