Pharmacy

Welcome back everyone! Today, we end off the western medicine series as we proceed to the pharmacy to collect the medications for Earth. Below is the result from when I surveyed my peers on how they dispose of their medications.

Figure 1 (Source: Author)

Side note: All 38 respondents are undergraduates in various educational institutions with bulk of them studying in Singapore. They span across different disciplines from reading the same course as me (Environmental Studies) to pursuing a degree in law or pharmacy. This is true for all the figures that I have used on my previous posts. \

Before I go further, I would like to critic my vague use of “medication” in the survey. What was not properly conveyed to the respondents then was that I was trying to refer to expired, non-prescriptive or over-the-counter drugs. Unfortunately, with reference to Figure 2, this means that analysis using the collected data would be rendered largely inconclusive.

That being said, if we run with the assumption that all respondents had the same definition of medication as me, it is reassuring to see that nearly three-quarters of us dispose of our drugs properly (ie throw into the bin). Interestingly, this percentage also matches the result of a similar survey conducted by the National Council of Social Service.

Figure 2 (Source: Pharmaceutical Society of Singapore)

“Medication waste is “preventable healthcare waste” and everyone in the supply chain has a role to play”

Associate Professor Lita Chew (NUS Department of Pharmacy) in an interview by Neo Chai Chin in Today.

To prevent an excessive accumulation of medications (and to save you some money), you can also adopt some of the following steps to reduce pharmaceutical wastage:

1. You can request to cutback your dosage to last for a fortnight first. This ensures minimum wastage if your body reacts poorly to what was prescribed.
2. For long-term prescriptions, instead of bulk buying the drug, you may opt for collections every few months instead.
3. A community pharmacist may advise you on how to productively utilise your medications before purchasing new ones or whether they are still as effective.

Apropos to why we continue to keep medications even past expiration dates, I believe that it may be associated with our Asian values and upbringing. Throughout the histories of war and famine, we’ve learnt to conserve and utilise all the resources we have to ensure our survival. This mindset can still be seen today from the cornucopia of ways that we’ve used the coconut, to the preservation of vegetables for consumption during winter and perhaps, the storage of unused pharmaceuticals.

On a more hopeful note, a recent study has revealed that most drugs found in pharmaceutical waste can be given a second life when properly treated. If done efficiently by all pharmaceutical outlets, this has the potential to reduce the volume of drugs manufactured and subsequently, diminish the adverse impacts on the environment.

If we are persistent in our efforts to be more aware of the life cycle of the medicine we consume, we can collectively reduce its detrimental effects on Earth and sustainably redesign its methods of production and disposal. Collective individual effort coupled with systemic changes are just the right remedies for Earth to start recovering and hopefully, with consistency, Earth can begin to breathe clearly again!

See you next week as we enter the realm of alternative medicines!