Packaging Our Pills in Plastic

Plastic is the horror product of our times. A relatively recent innovation, plastic penetrates every aspect of our lives. Scientists have estimated 8,500,000,000 kilograms of plastic waste is ending up in our oceans every year (source “How Much Plastic Is In Our Oceans”, second video below).

That is a lot of plastic in anyone’s language. Plastic shopping bags, plastic drink bottles, product wrappings. Although there has been much furor recently in Australia over the banning of single use plastic shopping bags at supermarkets, I have been noticing other uses of plastic that we could surely rethink.

Product wrappings: I have been on a linen buying spree of late and the amount of plastic in which sheets sets and doona sets are packaged is quite amazing. Not really reusable either.

Fresh fruit and vegetables: this is one of my biggest gripes. If they are not prepackaged, then we use those silly little plastic bags in the fruit and vegetable section of the supermarket. We get home and into the rubbish they go. There are paper bags for the mushrooms – why can’t we use recycled paper bags for buying our vegetables?

There are many examples. My focus today is medication packaging. Not just prescription medicines either. This first came to my notice when I bought a fish oil supplement.

Red line added to indicate the wasted space

That’s a lot of plastic serving no good purpose.

Then, a month or two later I picked up a prescription for some new medication. The bottle seemed rather large to me for 15 tablets – I was thinking these must be “horse tablets” and was not looking forward to the swallow challenge. Nothing could be further from the truth!

Itsy bitsy teenie weenie yellow tablets that did not even cover the bottom of the plastic bottle. OK, a one-off, I thought to myself. Then that medication got replaced in my regime by another one. These are a bit harder to see, being white in white. At least there are 30 tablets in this bottle, not quite as bad as the bottle above, but really?

I have other medication. Predisolone. Let’s compare the pair.

The bottle on the left in the above picture has 100 – yes, that’s right ONE HUNDRED tablets in it. The bottle on the right has 30. Just 30.

Just to tie up loose ends, let us compare the actual tablets from the above bottles.

Not much difference in size, is there? The tablet on the left is from the little bottle, the one on the right is from the big bottle. But you can’t tell how big the tablets actually are, you say? I thought of that. So here they are below with a five cent piece for scale.

How big is the pill bottle compared with a standard household object? Here it is compared to a coffee jar.

Comparison with a common coffee jar.

I am just one person out of the 7.6 billion people on this planet and I have looked at only THREE pill bottles: two prescription and one a supplement. Extrapolate that out over the world. How much plastic waste is coming from our pharmaceutical industry? Worse, how much of it is superfluous? Containing nothing more than air.

How are these bottles disposed? It varies: the itsy bitsy teenie weenie yellow tablets had to be returned to the pharmacy for controlled destruction. What happened to the bottle itself I do not know, but I trust my pharmacist took the responsible recycling option. But what do most of us do with most of our empty pill bottles? All the bottles I have carry a recyclable symbol. Do we all recycle? Privacy concerns have been mentioned to me: the information on the dispensing label is personal. We can and should return them to the pharmacy, but how many of us do?

Not only are there a lot of them, surely if we have to use plastic we could at least use appropriately sized bottles, not these humongous monstrosities.

Other medications come in blister packaging. While I am focusing on plastic today, there are surely waste concerns around blister packaging as well. At least there doesn’t appear to be as much superfluous plastic involved.

Blister packaging

One suggested explanation for the size of the bottles was that the dispensing label needs to fit. Yet the pharmacy managed to adhere a dispensing label quite well to the smaller prednisolone bottle above. The larger bottle didn’t even get a dispensing label attached as the bottle came in a cardboard box and the label was affixed to the box, not the bottle.

Other patient-centred considerations driving size might be:

  • The need to have a child proof or child resistant cap. None of the examples cited here had child resistant or child proof caps.
  • Larger bottles for ease of use by the patient – yet all those bottles are for me and I have to say ease of use is about the same for all of them.
  • The need to print information on the bottles. Medications come with Consumer Medication Information leaflets. These contain far more information than could be fitted on any size bottle. There are minimum requirements for “on bottle” information.
  • Differentiation so patients don’t get medications confused.

That last one would seem logical if it wasn’t disproved by the following example. These two bottles are exactly the same, but contain different strengths. As you will see I’ve written the strength in large letters on the caps because yes, I have accidentally taken the wrong strength in the creeping morning light when in a hurry. The labels are different colours, but who notices that at 6:30 am?

There are of course cost and manufacturing considerations. The above example, using the same bottle, reduces production costs. Yet if I go look in my medicine cabinet those are the only two that are the same. BioCeuticals, a company producing a wide range of supplements, do use the same bottles for many products. It is cheaper to print and adhere different labels than it is to manufacture a wide range of bottle sizes.

We are concentrating on plastic shopping bags and single use drink bottles. Yet many of us would dispose of more medication and supplement plastic bottles than plastic drink bottles. I might buy a disposable bottle of water once or twice a year only. Yet I have a considerable number of health related bottles in my cupboard.

The other consideration is leachate. Leachate is discussed in the Ted Ed video below. Not all medication bottles are discarded empty. I mentioned above one medication that was required to be returned to the pharmacist for destruction because of the toxicity of the medication. We’ve heard of estrogen ending up in rivers and streams. Other drugs excreted by humans do too.


Medications such as antidepressants, painkillers, antibiotics and estrogen are excreted by humans, and they wind up in treated sewage that is released into the environment, where fish and aquatic animals, even humans, can be exposed.

Source: Scientific American

Over time, discarded, unused medications are going to become part of the leachate from landfill where they have been discarded into the general waste bin OR the recycle collection has ended up in landfill due to contamination, which is more frequent that we like to think about. How dangerous is that over time?

If a bottle still has medication in it, does that contaminate the recycling collection?

How can we encourage the pharmaceutical industry to rethink packaging so we don’t end up with five or six times the amount of plastic needed to dispense a few tablets? It may not be as big a problem as plastic shopping bags, but it is contributing to the global plastic problem.

REFERENCES:

Department of Health, Therapeutic Goods Administration medicine labelling and packaging review, 2012

The videos below discuss plastic pollution generally. Both have been referenced in the above article.

Here is a video with lots of facts and figures from November 2017 – and the situation is only getting worse.

If you are too young to recognise the “itsy bitsy teenie weenie yellow” reference, here it is, just for you.

R

Robyn Dunphy1 Comment

When Medication Messes With Your Mind

Warning: This article discusses mental health issues (medication side effect).

If you are feeling depressed, down or anxious the following support lines are available in Australia.

WHERE have I been? I had an unpleasant reaction to a medication prescribed to treat my autoimmune arthritis. It has taken me a while to feel in a position to write ANYTHING (other than a 280 character Tweet).

My usual policy is not to name medications in my articles, simply because everyone’s experiences are very different with these medications. I don’t want anyone to think negatively of a medication because of my specific experience. However, in my last article I did name the medication I had recently started, methotrexate.

I had an unexpected reaction: both my dermatologist and gastroenterologist prescribe it for conditions in their specific areas of expertise and have never had any of their patients experience a similar reaction. I did locate a study reported on Science Direct that looked at three DMARDS and mental health in rheumatoid arthritis patients: “Anxiety, depression and suicidal ideation in patients with rheumatoid arthritis in use of methotrexate, hydroxychloroquine, leflunomide and biological drugs“. Perhaps there are condition factors at play, but as a patient going through the awfulness, that is really, at the time, irrelevant.

There is no doubt (and plenty of supporting documentation out there) that chronic illnesses can lead to, or indeed have, depression as a co-morbidity.  I’m also well aware and have written before about the importance of maintaining our mental health, so I always ensure I am taking the recommended actions to minimise the risk for myself. This was different.

I thought the first couple of weeks were OK – not fantastic, but OK. I went downhill after that. I won’t cover the full timeline in detail, suffice to say it progressively worsened. In the earlier weeks, there were days when I would feel the cloud lift, could almost set my watch by it, which made me think my body was simply adjusting to the new medication and all would be fine. I took the fifth tablet on the Friday as scheduled (weekly tablet). By the following Monday (three days later) I was leaning against the bathroom hand basin feeling completely unable to shower, do my hair, clean my teeth. Going to work just seemed beyond the realms of possibility. I’d already had time off, waiting for this medication to kick in, I didn’t want to take more time off. I didn’t want to crawl back into bed and hide under the doona, I wanted to crawl under the bed and stay there. It was awful. I had also been crying at the drop of a hat building up to this crescendo.

I dragged myself to work that day, I’m not sure how. The first stop I made was to my wonderful pharmacist. I explained how I felt and asked could this be the medication. Call your prescribing doctor was his immediate answer. So I did. Got an appointment for the Friday of that week. This simple action did make me feel slightly better, I’d done something, I’d taken action.

By this point it was as if there were two people in my head. One, the logical, practical, ex-science student, educated systems professional saying “this is a side effect, hang in there, there is help available”. One of my other doctors, in just general discussion, has suggested that was quite likely part of my problem – I was too logical about it and should have pulled the plug earlier! He thought he’d possibly be the same in a similar situation, which made me feel better about my stubborn perseverance! The second person in my head was the emotional or psychological me just wanting to crawl up into a ball and hide from the world. At times it was like the two were at war.

Did I feel “at risk” at any stage? I don’t believe so, but the logical me kicks in again now when answering that question and says “Can you be really sure? Your mind was not yours at the time.” The best I can say is while I felt, at the worst of it, that I was drowning in some sort of deep, dark, oxygen-depleting substance, at some level I still wanted to rescue myself, to get out of the quagmire.

My prescribing specialist took me off the medication immediately, prescribed another DMARD (this is my fourth since early 2015) and told me to do a two week wash out of methotrexate before starting the new medication. He said if I didn’t feel better in two weeks to see someone (i.e. a mental health professional). I actually did a three week wash out because I had an unrelated day procedure looming in another specialty and he asked me to wait an extra week. Oh, the juggling of it all.

By the end of the following week, (two weeks having transpired since last tablet taken) I was feeling perfectly normal psychologically. Or should I say, normal for me.

Another of my specialists asked why I had been taken off the medication. My response was this.

“There is a difference between wanting to die and not wanting to live, but it is a very fine line.” The former requires taking an action, the latter does not. I had at times felt the latter.

In my particular case not being able to exercise, due to the swollen foot and very grumpy shoulder, added to my “downer”. The two physical flares together made both gym and swimming activity inadvisable. I felt defeated. Exercise is not only my primary pain management tool, it is also a great mood lifter. Other clinical benefits are helping control weight and strengthening muscles, thereby protecting and supporting joints. Without exercise I felt I was losing on all fronts. I felt I was not in control of anything.

Mentally/psychologically I’m now fine, but I will never persevere as long again if I have another similar reaction to a future medication. I am aware this is the second time medication has messed with my mind, the first time being when I lost my sense of direction completely. At the time, I didn’t link that symptom to the medication I was on: I thought perhaps it was age related or similar. I’d even asked my then GP was there a test for early-onset Alzheimers as it was so debilitating and I was concerned maybe I shouldn’t be driving.

I remember being in my daughter’s car as she drove me to an appointment, fully functional GPS, very good driver (I taught her, so OF COURSE she is good). I was CONVINCED we were driving in the wrong direction. One week after stopping that particular medication (for other reasons), my sense of direction miraculously reappeared and I’ve had no problem since. No, correlation does not mean causation, but in this case, given I’d never had the problem before and haven’t had it since, I’m leaning towards it being a side effect. With two incidents now, may this indicate I have a predisposition, genetic or otherwise, for these medications to mess with my mind? I have no answer, but I’ll be super cautious from now on.

How am I, right now, physically? It is going to take up to eight weeks for the new DMARD to fully kick in; I’m in my second week. In the meantime I’m supplementing with prednisolone and the occasional Celebrex. I’ve started SLOWLY tapering off the prednisolone, but it will take time. I’m back swimming and gyming, more gently/lower intensity than previously at this point, but I’ll build back up. High reps, low weights for the moment. If I have to nominate a problem body part, it is feet and ankles which have never been a problem for me in the past. New challenges!

We are constantly learning on this chronic illness journey. For each one of us the lessons are different. This has been a difficult couple of months for me, without a doubt. My heart goes out to those people who suffer clinical depression, as I suspect what I experienced, albeit for a relatively short period, may be similar. I am so very grateful my solution was simply to remove a medication and thereby quickly regain my mental health.

On a good note, methotrexate was fantastic for my skin – the primary reason for the medication change! The UV B light therapy had worked wonders, but progress seemed to have stalled before the point of final perfection was reached. There was a small rough patch on my chest I was using as a progress gauge which had stopped reducing in circumference – a couple of weeks on methotrexate and that patch had completely resolved.

I cannot sufficiently thank my medical team, especially my GPs who again went above and beyond, providing additional support at very short notice. My daughter took a tearful phone call from me while she was still at work and spent a Sunday with me for which I was extremely grateful. I should also thank my Twitter friends for putting up with me – they didn’t know what was happening, but in some ways Twitter was a bit of a lifeline – it helped take me out of the darkness, with non-medical topics to try to focus on. I was on there WAY TOO MUCH!

I have deliberately written this article in “patient voice”. Not just for fellow-patients but for any health professionals that may wander past. None of us are alone. I realise I am taking a personal risk in publishing this: we are generally not a society that deals with chronic illness terribly well. We do much better with acute illness, where people get better. I still work in the “real world”, so publicly disclosing vulnerability can carry a price. Yet if we continue to hide ourselves away, to be silent about the challenges we face, we will not encourage change. I’m taking that risk.

If you notice a detrimental change in yourself that just doesn’t seem right, don’t try to soldier on without consulting your health professionals. It isn’t always new medications either, sometimes problems can arise after considerable time, for example two years. A special word of warning to those of us who live alone. We don’t always recognise what is happening to ourselves, especially if the change creeps up on us. We don’t have others to give us feedback. Looking back now, this was a little insidious. The accelerator really pushed down in that last week. We have to be extra vigilant, I think.

Time will of course be the judge, but hopefully I’m back on an upward path. All this because I wanted my skin back!

Footnote: This article is the third in a series detailing my medication change experiences. The first two articles are:

Robyn Dunphy7 Comments

No Remission for Me – At Least Not This Time

My experiment didn’t pay off. Am I sorry I did it? Not really, because knowing me, had I NOT done it, I would have always wondered. That is a very personal characteristic: it would not apply to everyone! While I am a firm supporter of modern medicine, I don’t like taking any more medications than absolutely necessary – had I not done that three month wash-out, I would have always wondered was I taking medication when I didn’t need to. Now I know! I need a medication!

The one thing I have learnt is this autoimmune arthritis, currently considered to be psoriatic arthritis, has a tighter grip on me than I thought.

So what happened? I was fine until about two weeks before the three month wash-out period ended. First I got a sore toe on my right foot. I thought nothing of it as I had been wearing in some new shoes plus it was possible I’d stubbed the toe without realising it. Then I got a VERY sore brachialis origin – thought maybe I’d strained myself in the gym, but couldn’t quite figure out what I had done, given I am so careful. Plus my right shoulder was tiring when I was swimming.

A week before I was due to see my rheumatologist, my left foot started swelling. Right at the moment I have only one pair of shoes I can wear and that is only because they are sandals with adjustable straps! These are my feet compared after a day at the office.

Today, I have a sore toe on my right foot, a swollen left foot, my whole right shoulder and upper arm are causing me issues and the discomfort is radiating up my neck. My fingers are a little stiff, but nothing too bad. My knees are grumpy, both of them. I’d being trying to avoid prednisone, but I’ve capitulated. Only a small dose though, to tide me over.

On a good note, my skin and nails look fantastic!

Two weeks ago I started methotrexate. Too soon yet to feel any improvement: so far no side effects. My dermatologist will be very happy – he wanted me on it straight away.

I am sad I’m back on medication, but I am grateful there are medications that will help. This is my third medication since the start of 2015. I am hoping this one will improve the fatigue and the brain fog, both of which have always been a bigger problem for me than actual pain (until right now, that is).

The brain fog is partly why I haven’t been writing – thinking is actually a struggle, particularly at the moment. Aside from that, I was wary of writing that I was fine until the jury was in at the three month mark. I knew I was taking a risk and did not want to sound celebratory until I knew whether I had anything to celebrate!

Will I do it ever again? I think, given my age, probably not. If I can get the brain fog to lift, I’d be ecstatic, as it is the one symptom that I find really soul destroying. I’m  good at managing the level of pain I experience, it is the brain fog that drives me nuts. I used to be an avid reader – now I am not simply because the combination of fatigue and brain fog makes it a challenge rather than enjoyment. Mind you, it is all relative I suppose. I was speaking to a contact the other day, bemoaning the cognitive impact. The response was something along the lines of, “Well, I’m glad I didn’t have to debate you before you got sick, you’re sharp enough now!” Maybe they were just trying to be nice. But us sufferers, we feel the loss very keenly.

The fatigue is helped by exercise, but with swollen foot and dodgy shoulder, I’ve been instructed to rest for the moment. This is SO not me, I’m struggling with abiding with that instruction. Mind you, it is difficult to go to the gym when my runners don’t fit!

In another two weeks I can hope for some improvement. Regular blood tests are again the order of the day, something else to fit into my schedule.

I have four weeks of UV B light therapy to go. Although it only takes a couple of minutes, it does require careful scheduling and at three times a week I will be glad when it is over: I won’t have to dash from work to the dermatologist at a specific time. A little flexibility will be restored!

Yes, I’m disappointed, but I’m happy I had the opportunity to try. Many people are too unwell to even consider such a trial. The fact I could, I am taking as a positive.

Now, just let me get back in the pool!!! I miss my swims!

Robyn Dunphy2 Comments

I Am Medication Free! For Now, Anyway……..

Right now I am medication free! No, I have not forsaken the wonders of modern medicine in any way shape or form, but in careful consultation with my rheumatologist I am taking nothing at the moment. How long this will be the case, I am unsure: we will reassess in February. If anything goes belly up, I’ll just make a phone call.

NEVER CHANGE YOUR MEDICATIONS WITHOUT YOUR DOCTOR’S APPROVAL.

Why is this happening? The medication I was on, my second inflammatory arthritis medication, was GREAT for the arthritis. However, it is considered not so great for my skin. This is my left arm a couple of days after the biopsies. This is the worst patch, always has been the problem area. Ignore the scar circled in black – that was the result of having a run-in, literally, with a broken fire extinguisher. The area circled in green is one of the biopsy sites.

Why is my suture not covered? Well, the steri strips started to come off, so I soaked them off. I can not use bandaids of any sort any more, my skin is so fragile – I remove them and the skin comes with them. Rather nasty, so I just don’t go there. It is bandages after bllod tests these days.

About two years ago we investigated my skin and it was then diagnosed as photosensitive eczema. It looked a little different back then. This November I have a completely different diagnosis. This does not mean the original diagnosis was incorrect – things change. In 2016 I was on different medications. Around the time of that first diagnosis I changed my arthritis medication and early this year (2018) I ceased taking medication for my hyperthyroid, having undergone radioactive iodine treatment. So a few changes in the two years.

My skin diagnosis now is atypical psoriasis, believed to be exacerbated (considerably) by my arthritis medication. My dermatologist discussed the matter with my rheumatologist and off the medication it is! I am starting UV B light therapy in the new year – can’t wait! I say atypical because it looks more like subacute cutaneous lupus erythematosus (SCLE) (per dermatologist) than psoriasis, but the biopsies, thankfully, told a different story.

My nails, which usually readers never see due to my passion for polish, look like this. Not all the time, it comes and goes, but the little fingers are particularly unhappy at the moment.

The next medication in line for me, agreed to by my dermatologist, rheumatologist and gastroenterologist, is methotrexate. By the time I saw my rheumatologist, I had been medication-free for a month and I don’t feel too bad at all. I asked about the possibility of seeing how I go without any medication. Other medical professionals are investigating some other symptoms I’m experiencing, some of my blood tests have been a bit erratic – it might be easier to isolate a cause if I’m medication free. That consideration aside, the less medication the better makes me happy. Methotrexate only takes four weeks to “kick in” and I’m certainly not going to be a martyr about it – if I feel I’m going downhill, I’ll be in my rheumatologist’s office very quick smart. I have backup medications in case I flare.

As I have to change medication anyway, it is an opportune time to try and see what happens. My arthritis related blood tests have improved considerably since late 2014 when I was diagnosed.

So how am I finding it? My feet have niggled at me a few times, both my knees are slightly grumpy at night if I walk too much during the day, the base of my thumbs hurt a little bit with certain grip actions (think holding my drink bottle to unscrew the top). If I have a really busy day I do stiffen up at night – but then that is not exactly new, I don’t think it has gotten worse – it is also more likely related to the degenerative changes in my lumbar spine than the arthritis. Other than that, I can’t complain. I swam 1,100 metres today, the first time I’ve managed a swim session over 1,000 metres for quite some time. I did 40 minutes strength training yesterday, my quad strength is actually improving. I did 9,000 steps (accidentally) on Thursday with no ill effects.

My biggest concern is my fatigue/lethargy may return. For me, that was a major problem. Settling the thyroid helped, of course. Now my bloods are indicating my parathyroid is not behaving – endocrinologist appointment in January to try to get to the bottom of that.

The BEST part is I can go out in the sun – sensibly, of course. I’ve spent two years avoiding any sunlight because of my skin, slathering sun cream from head to toe: slip, slop, slapping to within an inch of my life. Yes, I still have to be Sun Smart, but at least I can be normally Sun Smart now instead of paranoid! I also feel better psychologically: I felt as if I was a constant Seasonal Affective Disorder patient.

I don’t know if I will stay free of medication for the arthritis. I see this as an experiment. I do seem to be susceptible to the side effects of medications so if I can stay as healthy as I am now, I’ll be happy. Any deterioration, I’ll be in my rheumatologist’s office. It takes a while for the drug to wash out of one’s system, so I won’t really know for three months – I’m only a third of the way through.

I am very grateful to my specialists for allowing me to try this. It would not be an ideal option for a lot of patients, I know. I am certainly not recommending what I am doing and would definitely NOT be doing it without having discussed all the pros and cons with my guardian angel doctors. I am monitoring myself carefully.

The physical fitness and strength I’ve slowly spent four years building back up has certainly helped me manage my condition so far, but no, there is no guarantee by itself it is enough.

We shall see – wish me luck!

Robyn Dunphy3 Comments