What are these Orange Pills?

Have you ever been confused about identifying medications? When we do organizing projects in bathrooms we often run into UPO’s- "Unidentified Pharmaceutical Objects." People often pack pills in smaller containers to travel with them, and time goes by and they’ve forgotten what they are. We have also organized for clients’ elderly parents, and the number of medications can be staggering, some of them also "UPOs."

Thanks to Kim Komando, the "Digital Goddess," I just learned about a website where you can specify the shape, color, and imprint of a pill and find out what it is, with a photograph of the pill to verify it and links for more information. The site is http://www.drugs.com/pill_identification.html. My only critique of this site is that they don’t have diagrams to show you what the shapes look like before pressing the search button (what is "biconvex" or "ovoid rectangular?"), but if you click through you’ll see photos of pills in that category, so that is the next best thing.

There is controversy about how to dispose of medications– I have looked into this quite a bit. It’s fairly well established that you don’t want to flush them, because those drugs end up in our drinking water system. (I just saw the movie "Charlie Bartlett" last night, which was surprisingly fantastic, and they flushed a whole bunch of pills– no!! They do it all the time in the movies and on TV.) If you throw them in the trash, you want to make sure nobody can ingest them either accidentally or abusively. The best recommendation I have seen is taking them to your local pharmacy if they have a disposal program, but many don’t have them. Second best seems to be to add water to pills to dissolve them before throwing them away in the trash, or add salt or kitty litter to liquids to make them unusable.

Click here to watch the video I did for my News 8 Austin series on organizing medications, which covers these disposal issues and more.