Lack of medication: You should not swallow expired pills

Visit to a pharmacy in Berlin. In Germany, certain active ingredients and thus medicines are becoming scarce. The situation with regard to the care of children is particularly worrying, reports Anke Rüdinger, Chairwoman of the Berlin Pharmacists’ Association and member of the Executive Board of the Federal Union of German Pharmacists’ Associations. Both fever and antibiotic juices can only be obtained with difficulty or not at all. Now the President of the German Medical Association, Klaus Reinhardt, has made the suggestion that medicines that are no longer required could be exchanged or given away within the population. So people should help each other out. “In my opinion, this proposal from the President of the German Medical Association is irresponsible and has left me stunned. Medicines are goods of a special kind. They cannot simply be passed on from neighbor to neighbor. They have effects, but they also have side effects and interactions. And that’s why they always belong in the hands of a pharmacist, who decides whether the drug is suitable for the patient or not.” // “The President of the German Medical Association had also suggested that you can take expired medicines for a few more months. I would like to expressly warn you against this. Unlike food, medicines do not have a best-before date, but an expiration date. And for good reason. Up to this date, the manufacturer assumes a quasi-guarantee that the drug works and is harmless or at least harmless within the scope of the approval. If this expiry date has passed, this guarantee is no longer given. That is why I warn against using expired drugs. ” But what can be done to avoid future bottlenecks? “So we can produce fever juices in our pharmacies. We have already done that in our pharmacy. And I also know of many colleagues who have already done it. It is of course a lot of effort, this in the Making the prescription. This also makes it more expensive. So the health insurance companies have to be willing to pay for the effort. What is still difficult for us at the moment, in this situation, is that we are forced to get new prescriptions, prescription prescriptions , in order to be able to bill them properly. I would like to see the procedure simplified, so that if the industrially produced fever juice is not available, we can then automatically sell the juices we have produced ourselves.” // “In the long term, I think it would be my wish for active ingredient production to be brought back to Europe so that we can become independent of supply chains from Asia. I don’t know whether this can actually be financed. Society simply has to make the decision whether they want to finance it. In any case, it must be ensured that we become less dependent on these supply chains. Perhaps through reserves that are purchased in Germany.” Children’s hospitals and medical practices throughout Germany had recently reported that their capacities were overloaded. An unusually large number of children have been infected with the respiratory pathogen ESV in the past few weeks. Physicians report a high number of serious illnesses. There are also other diseases, such as influenza A and Covid-19.