What happens if you take expired medicine?

The cold medicine at home has been stored for too long and will reach its shelf life without you noticing. Therefore, many people may accidentally drink expired medicine when taking it. There will not be too many quality problems after taking expired medicine. As long as it is discovered in time, you can go to the hospital for gastric lavage if the condition is serious. Generally, expired medicine will only weaken its efficacy and will not cause any harm.

1. Definition of expired drugs: drugs that have not been used within the validity period and have potential quality problems. 2. The current situation of expired drugs: With the rapid development of China's social economy, people's health concepts and awareness are constantly strengthened. With the implementation of China's over-the-counter management system, consumers can judge, purchase and use over-the-counter drugs on their own without a doctor's prescription. Many citizens have small medicine boxes at home. Now there are more and more pharmacies opening everywhere. In order to attract customers, some pharmacies allow customers to apply for membership cards and offer discounts on certain days every month. Many citizens go to the pharmacy every month to buy some medicines that they may or may not need, resulting in an increase in expired medicines in their own medicine cabinets. However, many people do not have the habit of cleaning up their medicines. Even when they take medicine for minor illnesses, they rarely pay attention to whether the medicines they take have expired. As for the dangers of expired medicines, they said they did not pay much attention to them [1].

3. The whereabouts of expired drugs : A survey conducted by the drug supervision department shows that about 78.6% of households in China have spare drugs in stock, and 52.4% of households have a small home medicine cabinet. However, as many as 73.6% of households ignore the storage conditions of medicines, and at least 80% of households do not have the habit of regularly cleaning up expired medicines. Ninety percent of the respondents have experienced discarding expired drugs at will, and this problem is more serious in rural areas; some people expressed their concern that expired drugs would flow back into the market, so they would remove the packaging and discard it, or flush the drugs down the sewer; some older people would even sell the drugs to drug dealers who "buy drugs at high prices."

4. Hazards of expired drugs Expired drugs are not only worthless in themselves, but also cause many hazards, mainly in the following aspects: 1. Causes medication safety issues After the drug expires, it may not only lose its original therapeutic effect, but also may produce substances that are harmful to the human body due to changes in internal quality. If people use expired medicines, at best they may miss treatment and cause other health damage, or even threaten their lives. According to the Drug Administration Law, drugs that have expired are considered inferior drugs and are prohibited from being produced and sold. Some criminals buy back expired drugs at low prices, change the packaging and sell them through illegal channels to hospitals, pharmacies and some unlicensed clinics in remote areas. Then the drugs flow into the hands of consumers again, seriously endangering the public's health and life safety. 2. Causing environmental pollution problems. Improper handling of expired medicines will have a certain impact on the environment. On the one hand, directly discarding expired medicines may pollute the environment. Relevant surveys show that most people treat expired medicines the same as ordinary household waste and do not do any processing before discarding them. The ingredients in drugs can easily cause pollution when they are scattered into the environment, and some drugs with special properties, such as highly allergenic and volatile drugs, are more seriously polluting to the environment; on the other hand, the destruction of expired drugs may also pollute the environment. Due to the high cost of professional environmental destruction facilities and services, the relevant departments, units and consumers currently destroy expired drugs by open-air burning in landfills, which is bound to cause harm to the environment. 3. Causing waste of resources. The amount of medical expenses cannot be underestimated, whether for the country or ordinary consumers, and all aspects are trying to reduce medical expenses. A large number of expired drugs are not only worthless, but also require manpower, material and financial resources to deal with, resulting in a waste of resources.

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