Is it okay to use this when its expired?
Ketoconazole 2%… for yeast infections..it’s 2010 and it expired in 2006
“Former Yeast Infection Sufferer Understands Your Pain and Frustration...Her Amazing 4-Step Plan is 100% Guaranteed to Permanently Cure Your Yeast Infections...Without Doctors or Drugs...!”
It probably wouldn’t hurt anything, it’s not unsafe or anything.
But…. and this is a big "but"… it’s probably lost its effectiveness and potency, meaning that you’re wasting your time. I’d think that someone who has a yeast infection would want to be rid of it sooner rather than later.
Go buy some new stuff, many effective preparations are available over the counter.
John Jones, MD
Absolutely not.
i would say no. even if it is i wouldn’t risk it
hell no.
nope
EEwwww Yeast infestion! WTF!!! and It expired 4 years ago You NASTY!!
no
Normally it will just decrease in effectiveness so you would have to use more or just buy more. I think from 2006 you should probably get more.
NO! it could make it worse!
I wouldn’t. Stuff expires for a reason, and if it expired four years ago I wouldn’t take the chance.
No.
Oh no!! please dont. That would be bad hun….if you think you have an infection go and talk to your doctor…once a med expires its really dangerous to take it….:)
no way
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=AlDyqnL4wRvUF0ykjfsCOXvsy6IX;_ylv=3?qid=20100202134940AA970jB
No that’s why It has an expiry date on it, and 4 years out, come on.
nope
i’m sure you wouldn’t want that yeast infection to get more infected by expired medicine
No It May Cause an Infection if you use it!! I Recomend not using it!!:)
Call a pharmacist. They’re nice about answering questions and they’ll probably tell you that the stuff would have lost some of it’s effectiveness but that it might tide you over until you could get something fresh.
for medicine you can use it 6 months after it expires. But 4 years is way too much
I would never use expired drugs. Ever.
It might not be harmful, but the efficacy of the active ingredient would be extremely low. I would advice you to throw it out and go to your local pharmacy and buy some new cream. It’s never good to use medication after the expiry date.
I would say no with a cream given that its a cream instead of a pill or a capsule. I was told once by an Emergency Room Physician that a year after the expiration date is a good length of time to still be able to get the effectiveness of the medication. Below is an article I found online about medication half life and expiration dates:
Fifteen years ago, the U. S. military decided to find out. Sitting on a $1 billion stockpile of drugs and facing the daunting process of destroying and replacing its supply every two to three years, the military began a testing program to see if it could extend the life of its inventory.
The testing, conducted by the U. S. Food and Drug Administration, ultimately covered more than 100 drugs, prescription and over-the-counter. The results, never before reported, show that about 90% of them were safe and effective far past their original expiration date, at least one for 15 years past it.
In light of these results, a former director of the testing program, Francis Flaherty, says he has concluded that expiration dates put on by manufacturers typically have no bearing on whether a drug is usable for longer.
Mr. Flaherty notes that a drug maker is required to prove only that a drug is still good on whatever expiration date the company chooses to set. The expiration date doesn’t mean, or even suggest, that the drug will stop being effective after that, nor that it will become harmful.
Marketing Issue
"Manufacturers put expiration dates on for marketing, rather than scientific, reasons," says Mr. Flaherty, a pharmacist at the FDA until his retirement last year. "It’s not profitable for them to have products on a shelf for 10 years. They want turnover."
The FDA cautions that there isn’t enough evidence from the program, which is weighted toward drugs needed during combat and which tests only individual manufacturing batches, to conclude that most drugs in people’s medicine cabinets are potent beyond the expiration date. Still, Joel Davis, a former FDA expiration-date compliance chief, says that with a handful of exceptions — notably nitroglycerin, insulin and some liquid antibiotics — most drugs are probably as durable as those the agency has tested for the military. "Most drugs degrade very slowly," he says. "In all likelihood, you can take a product you have at home and keep it for many years, especially if it’s in the refrigerator."
Manufacturers’ View
Drug-industry officials don’t dispute the results of the FDA’s testing, within what is called the Shelf Life Extension Program. And they acknowledge that expiration dates have a commercial dimension. But they say relatively short shelf lives make sense from a public-safety standpoint, as well.
New, more-beneficial drugs can be brought on the market more easily if the old ones are discarded within a couple of years, they say. Label redesigns work better when consumers don’t have earlier versions on hand to create confusion. From the companies’ perspective, any liability or safety risk is diminished by limiting the period during which a consumer might misuse or improperly store a drug.
"Two to three years is a very comfortable point of commercial convenience," says Mark van Arandonk, senior director for pharmaceutical development at Pharmacia & Upjohn Inc. "It gives us enough time to put the inventory in warehouses, ship it and ensure it will stay on shelves long enough to get used." But companies uniformly deny any effort to spur sales through planned obsolescence.
Why Not Longer?
Now that the FDA has found that many drugs are still good long after they have supposedly expired, why doesn’t it advocate later expiration dates for consumer drugs? One reason is that the consumer market lacks the military’s logistical reasons to keep drugs around longer.
Frank Holcombe, associate director of the FDA’s office of generic drugs, says that in many cases a manufacturer could extend expiration periods again and again, but to support those extensions, it would have to keep doing stability studies, and keep more in storage than it would like.
Mr. Davis adds: "It’s not the job of the FDA to be concerned about a consumer’s economic interest." It would be up to Congress to impose changes, he says.
As things stand now, expiration dates get a lot of emphasis. For instance, there is a campaign, co-sponsored by some drug retailers, that urges people to discard pills when they reach the date on the label.
And that date often is even earlier than the one the maker set. That’s because when pharmacists dispense a drug in any container other than what it came to them in, they routinely cut the expiration date to just one year after dispensing. Some states even require pharmacists to do this.
Meanwhile, poor countries — under urging from the World Health Organization — often reject drug-company donations of much-needed medicines if they are within a year of their expiration dates.
It isn’t known ho