Bathroom cabinets might not be the safest place to store medications, according to experts.
“Medications should not be kept in the bathroom or a bathroom cabinet,” Shazia Zafar, an Oregon pharmacist told Health. “The humidity from the shower can seep in, which can break down your medicines.”
Health also cited the National Library of Medicine to point out that moisture and humidity can make medications less potent and cause them to go bad before the original expiration date. If the potency changes, you can’t be sure you’re getting the correct dose.
Heat and moisture can break aspirin down to vinegar and salicylic acid, which can irritate your stomach.
A 2021 study published in INNOVATIONS in Pharmacy used 154 American households and discovered only 23.3 percent of those households stored all of their medications appropriately. Out of the 457 medications in those spaces, approximately 17 percent had temperature issues, 11 percent had moisture issues and 9 percent had both.
There is no set-in-stone rule of where to store different medications because some are pills, others are gels and others come in other forms, such as liquids.
An ideal temperature for most medicines is between 59 and 86 degrees. Bathrooms in one study had temperatures that ranged from 56.8 to 88.7 degrees. The ideal humidity for medication storage is below 60 percent, but one study found bathroom humidity in households from 33 percent to 100 percent.
