Healthy Living

In a move that will probably freak out anyone who uses an over-the-counter med even occasionally, drugmaker Novartis announced yesterday that they're recalling certain bottles of Excedrin, NoDoz, Bufferin, and Gas-X. Yeesh, that's a lot of drugs, huh? The company issued the recall over concerns that the bottles could contain stray pills from other medicines, or chipped/broken tablets. Wuh-oh ... 

Here are the particulars, if you want to check the bottles hanging around in your medicine cabinet ...

Bottles of Excedrin and caffeine caplets NoDoz with expiration dates of Dec. 20, 2014, or earlier will be subject to the recall. Packages of pain medicine Bufferin and stomach medicine Gas-X with expiration dates of Dec. 20, 2013 or earlier are also affected.

If you have one of these bottles/packages in your home, you should discontinue use immediately and follow Novartis's instructions for getting more info on returning the product and receiving reimbursement.

Definitely a freaky situation, considering that Novartis's OTC meds seem to really fall into the category of the kind we take in the dead of night in the dark, stumbling into our kitchens or bathrooms, opening that child-proof lid with ease, and popping a couple of the pills without even looking at them. We figure we know what we're getting, and we trust that the company has done its due diligence to make sure the drugs are safe. Unfortunately, as we can tell from this recall, that's not necessarily the case. 

Novartis laments the screw-up and says they're "working closely with the FDA" (whatever that means), so I guess that's supposed to serve as a reassurance that this is a rare "whoops!" we won't have to worry about again (or at least for a while?). I hope that's the case, but in the meantime, I'm guessing we'd all do well to be even more aware and alert when popping our OTC pills.

Were you affected by this recall? Are you turned off by OTC drugs due to recalls like these?

Image via Excedrin.com