Common habits like storing pills in your medicine cabinet can reduce their effectiveness, experts say.
I recently visited my parents, and I was ransacking their kitchen for snacks when I noticed something: Their medications were in a cabinet near their oven.
“Keeping your meds there isn’t ideal,” I told my dad. “You’re cooking all the time, and it’s hot.”
“I’m sure it’s fine,” my father said. Then, he looked at me warily. “You’re going to ask some experts, aren’t you?” he asked.
“Tell Mom and Dad that’s not a good idea,” said Myriam Shaw Ojeda, an assistant professor of pharmacy practice and science at Ohio State University’s College of Pharmacy. Storing medication near a heat source may reduce its effectiveness, she explained.
My parents aren’t the only people who assume that one safekeeping spot is as good as another. Less than half of the participants in a 2021 study were storing their medications appropriately. And that’s just one of the many mistakes that people make when it comes to filling, storing and discarding prescription drugs.
Below, pharmacists share their best tips.
Take your meds out of the bathroom cabinet.
Just as storing pills near heat-generating kitchen appliances can reduce their effectiveness, keeping them in a bathroom cabinet is a bad idea, said Mary Bridgeman, a clinical professor at the Ernest Mario School of Pharmacy at Rutgers University. The term “medicine cabinet” is a “total misnomer,” she said.
Steam from your bathroom can erode the coatings on medications and heat can break down the active ingredients, said Eric MacLaughlin, the chair of the pharmacy practice department at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center.