Why do some medications have expiration dates while others don’t?

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Why do some medications have expiration dates while others don’t?

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3 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

elements decay and become ineffective and lose their potency after a certain amount of time

Anonymous 0 Comments

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Maybe this depends where you come from, but I understood that in the US, medications MUST have an expiry date.

A lot of “Expiry dates” on medications are artificial. The medicine may be entirely fine after that date, but the company hasn’t tested it so they can’t guarantee full effectiveness.

In other occasions, the date is merely the date that the medication is supposed to be 100% effective. Some chemicals break down and become less effective over time, but even if you take an Aspirin a few months after expiry, the odds are very high that you will still get like 95% effective medicine if not 100%.

So unless the medication is life-saving or life-preserving (e.g. an epi pen or a medicine that keeps your heart running or whatever), you are frequently safe to use the expired stuff. Particularly something like an over the counter pain killer that will still do a reasonably effective job.

the US government buys a large amount of drugs for people like the military, and after having to throw out and rebuy a lot of the drugs upon expiry, someone did a study and discovered what I noted about the drugs still being pretty much fully effective after that date.