My GP has just advised me to halve my dose of a certain medication. As the tablets are pretty tiny I asked him how. He recommended a pill-cutter.
Well, what a revelation. No messing about with knives and tablet fragments flying all over the place. Just wedge the tablet in the cutter and shut the blade over it. Two perfect halves. Magic.
Someone was asking on the forum the other day about how to cut pills, so I thought some members, like me, don't know about these little devices.
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Coco51
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I've been using one for years to cut sleeping pills into quarters as I hate having to take them! Sadly, mine won't cut accurately in half, with one half being more like a quarter-and-a-bit at times. Is yours better?
Also, I was told not to cut any pills that don't already have a score-line (but that might be wrong advice).
Mine seems to work amazingly well. The blade is very fine and it's new. I guess it won't be 100 percent right but as the GP told me to do it I'll go with it.
I have been using them for years. Actually the pharmacy should either cut them for you or provide a cutter for free.
My Bisoprolol 5 mg need to be cut in half. But it is impossible to handle them as the ones here on Canada are so small you need tweezers to hold them. So I have the pharmacist cut them for me. Still they come out uneven halves.
It's Indapamide. It's a BP tablet a diuretic. I have lost weight and my blood pressure has gone lower so we are trying lower dose. There is no line on the tablet. But it works well if you make sure the pill is properly gripped.
I use a pill cutter also. The tablet does not need to be scored to be cut. I take digoxin which is scored, but I cut it at any spot, works well even if the cut is not in the score.
Just a word of warning, a pharmacy was cutting my tablets for me, until one day I could smell coconut-scented lotion on the pill bottle. I'm extremely allergic to all perfumes, especially the coconut scents. So I moved the pills to a different bottle, took a tablet, and became quite ill and vomited up the pill. The coconut-scented lotion was on the pills! I went back to the pharmacy and complained about it. They said they don't wear gloves when they handle the pills!!! I changed pharmacies immediately, and always, always, cut my own pills.
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