Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Very Expensive Pills

You've been placed on a course of expensive medication in which you are to take one tablet of medicine A and one tablet of medicine B daily. You must be careful that you take just one of each because taking more of either can have serious side effects. Taking an A without taking a B, or vice versa, can also be very serious, because they must be taken together in order to be effective. In summary, you must take exactly one of the A pills and one of the B pills at one time. Therefore, you open up the A bottle, and you tap one A pill into your hand. You put that bottle aside and you open the B bottle. You do the same, but by mistake, two Bs fall into your hand with the A pill. Now, here's the problem. You weren't watching your hand as the pills fell into it, so you can't tell the A pill apart from the two B pills. The pills look identical. They are the same size, same weight, same color, same everything, and they are not marked differently in any way. What are you going to do? You cannot tell which pill is which, and they cost $100 a piece, so you cannot afford to throw them away and start over again. How do you get your daily dose of exactly one A and exactly one B without wasting any of the pills?

5 comments:

  1. Get out another A pill. Cut all four in half, and have half of each.

    The other halves can be taken tomorrow.

    This does not work on those time-release capsules, nor on those pills that are half one thing and half another already.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Technical, but right! :-)

    The good news is you get to set aside the other half for tomorrow.

    ReplyDelete
  3. throw them out and hope you have good insurance, or if you are a war veteran, the government pays for them

    ReplyDelete
  4. that solution is for most people who wouldn't be able to figure out the right way to handle that situation.

    ReplyDelete
  5. To be honest, if this had happened to me in real life, I bet I would have gone right down that road. It can be hard to think in terms of a solution.

    ReplyDelete

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