Looking at you Augmentin and Tamiflu.
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Not about the teste, many medichines have no taste at all, but contain some component for example penicilline, zinc or copper who trigger bitter receptors in your mouth making it feel bad. Its called “dysgeusia” (or hypogeusia)
They can, but they don’t because some people (especially children) could start to treat drugs like sweets or soda. That could have disastrous results. We must make sure children don’t see drugs as something tasty and wanted.
You got it wrong. They’re designed to taste bad so kids especially kids don’t pop the pills non-stop even when they’re not sick.
>Especially the ones meant for kids.
Look at sweets. What do kids do with things that taste good? Find ways to eat more than they’re supposed to. With medicine that’s potentially deadly.
The really potent ones taste bad. Others have explained.
Some of the daily ones like allergy meds taste good, but in order to keep them safe, the bottle size is limited to keep the amount of drug under the lethal limit.
I think other comments had it right, but I can add that having a bad taste may also make the medicine more effective. An unpleasant experience makes people think “I hate it, it’s disgusting. It must be strong”. Wich actually makes it more effective ! It adds a placebo component to the medicine basically. So maybe they do it for that too ?
It’s because when formulating medications it’s not only the active ingredient (drug) we consider when making a dosage form, we also take into consideration excipients – pharmacologically inactive (no effect on the body), but has a role in making your dosage form (tablet, capsule, suspension, syrup etc.)
Now the more excipients you add into the formulation (sweeteners, colorants, flavorants, preservatives) the higher the chance that the ingredients in your formulation will not play nice with each other (each ingredient has a chance to have a chemical reaction with other ingredients). The higher the chance that your formulation will not be stable (spoils/breaks down easily) or be effective (drug doesn’t perform as expected)
TLDR – more ingredients more chance of being unstable hence more chance of being unusable.
If you have problems with taking your medications please consult your pharmacist, they can even recompound your medication into something more palatable if need be
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