Category: Daily Living
I received an Email about the fedaration and ACB working together to get more accessibility for the blind to be able to read pill bottles. Is this true? Are they working with all the pharmacies to get a reader for the totally blind to be able to read pill and other types of medicine bottles or is this just a rumor?
Is this a major problem? I mean, I just ask them to tell me which one is which, and that's about the extent of it. But then, I don't take many pills.
the only time I ever have any trouble identifying various pill bottles is if I ever have multiple prescriptions in the same size bottle, which, if I recall correctly, has only ever happened once in my lifetime. So, I stored the two bottles in different places to prevent them from getting mixed up.
It's probably a serious problem for older blind adults, yes. Not only because they take more stuff than the rest of us, but because they go blind and have less time being blind and more to adapt to.
But do we really need a pharmasudical policy to deal with that? By them one of those pill sorters and be done with it.
I don't see why people are so quick to jump to litigation as a means to an end. Rather than making the pharmasies do something to make pills organizable. How about we take some initiative to organize them ourselves?
I totally agree with Cody here. if people don't know what's out there, they should learn to be resourceful and ask. with most things in life, there are ways to get around instances such as this.
Again, I don't think the target audience is the working or fully functioning population. We're talking the elderly, people my mother's age who go blind, who need extra assistance and don't really know how to come by it the way people like you or I have come to deal with things over time.
The problem I have is many assume the only audience for these types of things is working-age, self-sufficient, self-reliant individuals like you or me. And we don't even make up a majority of the blind population. For the elderly, issues of sight are just one of a myriad things they now have to adapt to.
Litigation is not often the best solution, but whatever solution we have can't involve telling them to act like us. They simply are not us, and they are not capable. Sorry if that sounds harsh but they just aren't. Some, very few, are. Many are not.
Yep. I agree with Leo. Aging seniors who lose their vision just don't cope like those of us who've been blind longer. And unfortunately, I have encountered a lot of younger blind people who should know how to cope who don't understant the concept of taking initiative and figuring stuff out on their own. Personally, I think all this is silly yet sadly, I see the need for it too.
I understand what Leo and TTB are getting at, but I still hold true to my stance. it may be difficult for the elderly to figure out a workable system as we've done, but that's where others come in and assist.
I meant to say that's where others should come in and assist.
I have a lot of sympathy for the very elderly losing their sight, because, like Leo said, they probably have a whole host of problems, but honestly, because of their age, it's not very likely they'll learn braille. there's always the idea of marking the pill bottles with a raised letter or some other indicating mark, but anyone can do that, with one of those 3D pens. No need for litigation. As for buying the pills at a drug store, or having a prescription filled, somebody else is probably going to have to help them do that, anyway. we don't need everything labeled for us. Use a little creativity.
As for the people who lose their vision at a younger age, I hate to sound harsh, but you'd better learn to cope, because, unless they come out with some miracle cure in the next few years, welcome to the rest of your life. I know it's an adjustment, and certainly not an easy one. I'm not saying you aren't entitled to your moments of grief, but eventually, you need to get up, dust yourself off, and start living. and part of that is getting creative sometimes.
It is not so much an issue for those like us, who has a functioning body, it could be a problem for those who takes a range of different medication day in day out. 2 medications could be all right, but if you have 6 medications, it could be totally different in terms of how you handle it, and it is sometime, nice to know what you are taking as much as knowing the name could help of finding out information on it too.
I took a medication ones for some sort of flu virus, and i was surprise when the pharmacy show me the braille on the pack. Not that i need that, but it does make a good impression on me. touch wood, i hope i'll never need that medication anymore, but hey.
I'm a senior who has been blind all my life. One time with a blood pressure pill, both pills felt the same and I had to take both together for the right potency. I marked the bottles in braille myself. I have a caregiver who I pay to come in once monthly. No family. I wonder too what happened to bring this drug bottle labeling problem to the forefront. I did hear an incident where somebody took the wrong medication because both bottles felt the same and the pills felt the same. He about killed himself because his liver just about shut down. Maybe there are other instances out there of pill or medicine mixups that haven't been discussed. The idea of both organizations working together on this is what made me wonder about this issue.
I can appreciate your situation Bea. I admit, I am in the sandwich generation: kiddo getting ready for college and parents and parents in law being in your age group. I get angry about few things blind oriented, but when these uber snooty organizations do horrendous activities like keep rails off train platforms and keep audio walk signals off streets, I am appalled.
Please do not misunderstand or take me the wrong way, but my generation is now responsible for your generation's well-being and I've a bit of the old-school protector instinct built in which modern life has not curbed. Your generation is going to live a lot longer than your parents' and like others said, we don't have all the adjustments down, meaning people won't be getting their eyes back any time soon.
I have a window into this not only having parents, but a member of our Coast Guard flotilla who is still registered active with us, though his role is more advisory now. He's a man's man: was a navy man out on the ships, and yet now he's got macular degeneration and is beset with a whole host of problems these snot-nosed little whippers running the organizations have zero clue what to do about. I'll be honest: I don't either. I'vebeen asked to help and I am as useless as sh*t on a pumphouse handle when it comes to giving him any real assistence, except with physical things like a iPod or iPad.
But people who don't realize the importance here aren't either in your age group or in us middle-age sandwich generation crowd who got your back and lookin out for you.
I'm definitely not saying it's not important for pill bottles to be labeled. I just think it's something that can easily be done by marking one of them with a dot, or even just a slight, yet noticeable scratch in the lid, which can be done right at the pharmacy if you have a nice enough pharmacist, or at home if you have any sort of sighted help.
Also, there are those little pill cases that have a compartment with each day of the week labeled on the cover, and yes, I've seen these with braille on the lids. You put your pill supply for each day in the corresponding compartment. This works great if you have to take three or four pills a day. I know a lot of sighted seniors who do this just so they don't have to go sifting through their medicine cabinet every day.
Bea, I see what you're getting at. It seems pretty unlikely that the NFB and ACB can collaborate, doesn't it? At the end of the day though, that's not what matters. They will continue to be split down the middle about mostly everything else, and keep a safe distance from each other and scoff at each other's ways.
Something else to consider with seniors is that when they start to lose vision, they often just shut down and don't know what to do. They are generally overlooked by the rehab system, because they aren't seeking employment. Many of them have no idea that rehab even exists and don't know where to go for help. Their families are equally clueless. So, they don't know about bump dots and raised line pens and other marking techniques that we all take for granted. And as already mentioned, they're usually taking a whole lot more than one or two different pills. And in many instances they're also dealing with senility or dimensia which further complicate their ability to remember a labeling scheme even if they new how to mark stuff. Yes, there should be people who stand up and help or companies should do the right thing and make stuff accessible. But the reality is, that they don't and companies often won't do the right thing until they have to. So just because those of us around here think this is silly and that people just need to suck it up and deal with it doesn't mean that this kind of thing isn't needed to deal with a special population that isn't equipped to just suck it up. But to get to the original point, I am always surprised when the two groups actually agree on something, although I haven't heard of any cooperation on this particular issue. That doesn't mean it's not happening, of course. I'm probably just out of the loop on this one.
Just looked further through google; Ls and S products has a talking pill bottle identifier. The pharmacist reads the bottle info into a recorder and then the person puts the bottle in the stand of the identifier to read the info back. Thought I would post this if somebody is interested. I agree with the senility issue and a senior being totally lost without eyesight. No product would do any good there.
also people i want you to consider this. some of us may live completely on our own and get stuff from a large store like walmart for our medical needs. you think a clerk at a busy store in the middle of a busy day is going to help you mark your stuff just because you don't have someone sighted where you live? the pills being the same could be fatal, but you guys act like it's not a big deal.
also people i want you to consider this. some of us may live completely on our own and get stuff from a large store like walmart for our medical needs. you think a clerk at a busy store in the middle of a busy day is going to help you mark your stuff just because you don't have someone sighted where you live? the pills being the same could be fatal, but you guys act like it's not a big deal.
It's not that we don't need to differentiate them. It's just that there are other ways to go about it besides litigation. I've been living without sighted people for two years now, have bought various medications, and i haven't even had so much as a close call. If you know something could be dangerous should you misuse it, make sure you either mark it while you are around omsone who can help, or, failing that, keep it in a separate location.
for those of you who have iPhones, there are free apps available that can help you out with this. If you have a scanner, and some sort of OCR, you can scan the bottle.
not everyone can just shell out the money for an IPhone, a scanner, or an OCR package. getting their meds is sometimes hard enough.
Obviously many here are not old enough to appreciate the challenges aging parents and relatives run into. And the reality is, they often do a lot of things far more independently than most people realize.
Anything we can do for their life is an improvement. That means audio walk signals, rails on subway platforms, and whatever we need to do for their medications so they can tell the difference.
Exactly. Though an iPhone app or OCR would be greatly helpful in, well, many respects, there are other ways to go about this that can be cheaper, yet almost, if not just as affective.
There are pros and cons to everything, I guess. Rails on train and subway platforms make a lot of sense, but I'm not so sure about audio walk signals, simply because even though they tell you when you can cross the street, there could still be an idiot speeding down the road and ... boom, he'll run right into you. I'm not necessarily against audio signals per say, but I worry about the fact that sometimes they aren't that accurate.
Statistics show the audio signals have saved lives, not only of the blind but of other groups.
Interesting, nobody says let's get rid of bike lanes because people could swerve into that bike lane and hit a cyclist, or let's get rid of the yellow line on the road because traffic could swerve in from another lane.
Some of these arguments against technologies and measures are really paltry at best.
in all fairness, anyone, blind or sighted, needs to use common sense above all else. If you see the light turn green, but there are cars zooming right passed you at full speed, one can only hope you'd realize the light was malfunctioning, or someone was running a red light, and wait to cross the street. this isn't any less true for blind people.
agreed, post 26.