Friday, April 16, 2021, is National Clean Out Your Medicine Cabinet Day. You may be ready to go in your own household, but what about your parents or other older loved ones? As we get older, we tend to accumulate more medicine for various illnesses or ongoing conditions. It can also become easier to forget what is in the cabinet. This year, take advantage of the extra time spent at home to help your aging parents on National Clean Out Your Medicine Cabinet Day.
1.Clean Out the Cabinets. Your parents may not know what they have in their medicine cabinets. If they still live in your childhood home, it may be very possible that there are expired bottles of strep throat antibiotics from the 1980s sitting in the back of the medicine cabinet in your old bathroom that nobody has thought about for decades. One of the best ways to help your aging parents may be to offer to come over and clean out the cabinets yourself or do it together with them. It can be an opportunity to make the cabinets safer both for your parents and their guests and spend some quality time together.
2. Come Up with an Organization System. Your parents may need help keeping track of their medications on a daily or weekly basis. In addition to using tools like a pill organizer, encourage them to put a note in the calendar to go through the medicine cabinet on a monthly basis going forward. This way, they can keep track of what they have, what they need, and what they should remember to throw away when it has expired.
3. Proper Disposal of Expired Medications. It can also be important to offer to help by bringing expired or unused medications to a proper disposal facility. Unfortunately, your parents cannot just throw medication in the trash or flush it down the toilet. It may be tough, however, for them to go out of their way to dispose of it properly. You can offer to come by and pick up whenever it is needed.
For legal support or community resources offering support for aging parents, please contact our office to schedule a meeting time.