Just swallowed 2 Nyquil and they were unpleasantly large to swallow. Got me wondering.
In: Biology
Ever wonder why there’s inactive ingredients?
You can only get so precise when measuring or dispensing anything. There’s a margin of error.
This example isn’t going to be even close to normal manufacturing tolerances but you’ll get the general idea… You have a scale that can do milligrams. For uh… Jewelry ;).
Now, you need to measure out 1 milligram. Not 1.1. Not 0.9. What are you to do?
What if… You were to put in 9 parts of something inactive for every 1 part active? Then, you could measure out 10mg. And now you’re within your acceptable tolerance.
The smaller the active dose of a medication, the less of a tolerance there is to over- or under- measuring. So that ratio is going to be much higher… And for professional manufacturers of medications, they aren’t talking about 1mg and not 1.1 or 0.9, they’re concerned about 1mg and not 1.001 or 0.999. They want 1.000. To make that happen, they’re going to be looking at hundreds or potentially thousands of parts of inactive to one part active.
(It’s a very similar, but slightly different, problem when they need to ensure that the random particles of active medication are evenly distributed from pill to pill.)
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