how do pharmaceutical companies dose their pills? I got this potassium supplement has 99mg that’s a tenth of a gram in a paracetamol sized pill, like how do they know it’s definitely in there and it’s that much
In: Chemistry
The same way you’d bake a cake, you take some sugar, you measure what proportion you want, then you take flower, measure how much fits the proportion. Say you as one cup of sugar, and two cups of flour. So the proportion is 1 : 2
And the mix the two together very thoroughly. You can then be reasonably certain that any amount of that mix you scoop up with contain a proportion of 1 part sugar : 2 parts flour.
You then know how much of the total weight your sugar makes up, and you fill in pill forms with enough of the mix to get you to the weight of sugar you need, along with some filler flour to fill out the form.
No replace the word sugar with Potassium and replace flour with “a mix of probably multiple different ingredients that help bind the Pill together and keep it shelf stable.” And you get yourself a pill with 99mg of potassium even if it’s not pure potassium.
Production lines will then also randomly select some samples from each batch to quality test them, and assuming those samples meet the standards they need too, the batch is good to go.
If I’m understanding the question right, they just weigh out the active ingredient, in this case 99mg of potassium and the rest is just an inactive ingredient that allows the potassium to pass through your body and get where it can be absorbed.
Think of it like this the 99mg of potassium are the passengers and the rest of the weight of the pill is the vehicle that get the passengers where they need to go.
In the United States, the United States Pharmacopoeia mandates that the amount of drug in the pill must be within 95-105% of what is actually listed, which is very frequently quality controlled and tested. The rest of the pill is filler, and stuff to make it dissolve quickly or slowly, or taste better, look like what it’s trade name medicine looks like, et cetera.
You want 99mg in say 1000mg tablet. As an example
Add 990ml of cordial to 1000 litres of water and pour out a ml
You make it it huge batches where the quantities are easy to measure out for both. If you mix the two materials well (in its own a bit of a science), then any little small amount should be the same ratios as the huge mixture. It’s also important to be sure your mixture is made up of very fine grains. If you only have 20 grains per pill and you only want 1 grain of medicine you’re much more likely to have composition errors versus 20,000 grains and 1000 grains of medicine. If you get 990 or 1001 grains of meds it’s fine.
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