Most of the time the drug handles time well but the excipient degrades. This makes it very hard to control how those drugs will work. It opens so many variables.
It is like not using the seat belt could save your life if you are thrown away of the car at some specific circumstances, like happened to a person I know. But they are there because it works better most of the time as engineers could design safety with less variables.
My father had an emergency immune problem(that we have already identified as it is recursive) and the only required drugs in house were expired for some years. He took those before we bought the new ones and the old ones were like 1/3 potency of the new ones.
Given that most of the price of drugs come from intellectual property and patents and each pill cost dollar cents to make, I don't see the urgency of taking expired drugs.
If Hospitals trow away expired drugs then it is a good reason to take into account in the global negotiation process, and I bet they already do in countries that buy drugs in bulk.
It is like not using the seat belt could save your life if you are thrown away of the car at some specific circumstances, like happened to a person I know. But they are there because it works better most of the time as engineers could design safety with less variables.
My father had an emergency immune problem(that we have already identified as it is recursive) and the only required drugs in house were expired for some years. He took those before we bought the new ones and the old ones were like 1/3 potency of the new ones.
Given that most of the price of drugs come from intellectual property and patents and each pill cost dollar cents to make, I don't see the urgency of taking expired drugs.
If Hospitals trow away expired drugs then it is a good reason to take into account in the global negotiation process, and I bet they already do in countries that buy drugs in bulk.