Pill crushing results hard to swallow as almost a quarter of drugs are lost
Rinsing the device twice is the key
28th March 2018
By Rada Rouse
Pill crushing to help patients with swallowing difficulties can result in nearly a quarter of the drug being lost, pharmacy academics warn.
The worst results came from manually operated crushers that required a hand twist and had a serrated, rather than flat, crushing surface, a study of 24 commercially available crushing devices found.
It was hard to recover crushed powder from the 12 devices offering disposable bags or cups.
Tapping it out led to an average loss of 6%. Rinsing out the vessel only once led to an average 24% drug loss but rinsing it twice reduced