Splitting pills with powder inside, travel edition

December 2, 2021 10:51 AM

I am taking a medicine but the pills available where i am are 30 mg. I take 20 mg. Without using a hefty scale, how to i effectively split these capsules with powder inside?

Currently i am emptying the powder of two pills onto a plate and scrapping the powder into three even-looking piles.

I have tried mixing the contents into 100ml of water and taking 33 ml out three times, but i don't believe the medicine is evenly mixing into the water. So i don't believe this is effective.

I travel a lot and a digital scale seems like a thing that is to big and heavy to carry around with me.

posted by jander03 to Health & Fitness (9 answers total)

Best answer: This is extremely ill advised. You are not a pharmacist, and many drugs cannot be 'split' like this.

However, pocket mg scales are not large, nor heavy, and not at all expensive. Assuming that this is possible with this kind of medication (IANYpharmacist, so who knows) this would be cheap insurance against fucking it up by eyeballing it.
posted by furnace.heart at 11:01 AM on December 2, 2021 [10 favorites]

Best answer: another travel sized one
posted by calgirl at 11:04 AM on December 2, 2021

If possible, ask the pharmacist about this. Aside from some capsule contents not being splittable in that way, if they are splittable they may have a way to do it for you or advice on the best way to do this, and possibly can comp you some empty capsules.

But yes, the small drug scales (aka espresso scale, lab scale, pocket scale) are very handy for this and weigh about four ounces with batteries.
posted by Lyn Never at 11:14 AM on December 2, 2021 [1 favorite]

Best answer: If you haven't tried, it's probably worth it to look for a compounding pharmacy that can make and ship pills with the correct dose rather than trying to portion it out yourself.
posted by BungaDunga at 11:23 AM on December 2, 2021 [12 favorites]

This is potentially extremely dangerous. Many encapsulated drugs are designed with the capsule in mind to control the drug's release. When you remove the capsule you remove this method of mediation. Please, please talk to a pharmacist about what you're doing and see if you can get the drug compounded, or at least to verify whether or not you're going to hurt yourself.
posted by Anonymous at 1:50 PM on December 2, 2021

You can easily buy pill capsules. Assuming you don't want to go to a compounding pharmacy, you could get a scale, measure out the correct dosage and pack your own pills. The first hit on google was this from Amazon, $7 for 1000 capsules.
posted by Hactar at 1:52 PM on December 2, 2021

Also: some drugs have specially designed pill capsules that are not the same as the gelatin ones you buy on Amazon.
posted by Anonymous at 2:03 PM on December 2, 2021

Ask a pharmacist if the pills are safe to split up; many are. Timed-release pills are generally not. Ask the pharmacist if an imprecise dose is okay. I am taking variable doses of my anti-depressant, with better results than regular doses, but, Anecdata. Pharmacists are great at this stuff.
posted by theora55 at 2:04 PM on December 2, 2021 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: Thanks! Just wanted to say that this particular medicine is approved by the pharmacist for splitting and consuming in this way.
posted by jander03 at 6:55 PM on December 2, 2021 [1 favorite]