drugs

i haven't blogged much lately; most of my what-would-be-blogging time is spent making videos of me practicing my new ukulele, which is way more fun than blogging :)

but i had an annoyance this week that merited a blog post: meds.

i have several chronic medical conditions, two of which are treated with daily and as-needed medications: migraine and narcolepsy. for migraine, i take as many preventive measures as i can but still suffer daily these days. it sucks. so i take a dose of sumatriptan pretty much every day, timed to maximize the number of valuable hours i have pain free.

i take sumatriptan (used to be branded Imitrex) in two forms: 100-mg caplets and 6-mg injections. both forms have changed formats lately, which is jarring by itself, i confess. but here's the latest change that has annoyed me.

the first generic sumatriptan caplets i got and had for at least a couple of years were by Ranbaxy, and the new ones are from Dr. Reddy's. 

new box is larger. 

not a huge deal. i have lots of storage space in this house.

but the boxes are larger because the pills are larger. by about three times, according to my eyeballs.

also not a huge deal because i am lucky enough to be able to take pills pretty easily; i understand that some people really have a hard time with large pills, but i'm fortunately not one of them.

the part i hate about the new pills is that they require SCISSORS to open each tablet's blister pack.

seriously? you want me to get out a pair of scissors and cut a tiny tough blister pack when i can barely focus my vision and think?

this is the result of my first attempt.

seriously, drug manufacturers. i am sincerely grateful for the relief that your medications provide me in my times of need. i am sincerely grateful that you make them available to me. i am sincerely grateful that i have prescription-drug coverage and good health insurance that help me afford the doctor appointments and medications they think will help me. but please do a little research with your consumers to learn what will and won't work for them beyond just the active ingredients.

when i was younger, i started a career as a technical writer. one of the first and most valuable things i learned back then was that a good technical writer is thinking as much about the audience's affect as about their needs for and capacity to receive the technical information. when a software user is frustrated by unintuitive software and interfaces, enough that he or she has now gone looking at the manual or help to just move to the next step in his or her task, he or she does not need added layers of difficulty, confusion, obfuscation. that user needs accessible, fast help with no fuss. no surveys, no questions, just get me past this stumbling block and back to what i need to do. NOW.

the same principle applies to medications (and packaging and, well, pretty much anything in life). (if i had another career life, i'd do packaging design. it's definitely a Thing for me. my organizer teases me about it because some packaging--especially Apple stuff--is too beautiful to throw out.)