What Ezy Dose makes, and who it is for

The things a person holds while taking medicine. Weekly, AM/PM and monthly pill organizers in six sizes; travel cases, keychain fobs and locking boxes; pill cutters and crushers; disposable and reusable pill pouches; oral syringes, droppers, medicine spoons and cups for liquid medicine; bulb nasal aspirators, ear syringes and lice combs for the nights nobody planned; and a small shelf of organizers, cutters and a pill shooter for dogs and cats. Eleven shelves in all, and every one of them ends up on a kitchen counter or a bathroom shelf.

Three things you can check on the box. Push-button lids that open under the side of a thumb rather than a fingernail, on a line the Arthritis Foundation has certified as Ease of Use. Six depths, from a pocket Small to a 3XL that takes sixty aspirin-sized tablets a slot, so the lid closes over a real day of capsules and tablets. And compartments that lift out of the Large and larger trays for washing, or for taking one day to work.

The trade is that none of it is child-resistant, and we say so on every page where it matters.

Anyone with a schedule that has more than one line on it, and anyone filling a box for someone else. The weekly and AM/PM organizers are for a person managing their own tablets; the monthly cases are for the daughter or the carer who fills thirty-one compartments once; the syringes and spoons are for a parent at three in the morning; the push-button line is for hands that have stopped doing fingernails. The pet shelf is for the dog on a heart tablet who forgets it as reliably as a person does.

No, and the tools do not decide it. Whether a tablet may be split or crushed is a question for the pharmacist who filled it and the label that came with it, and the pages here that touch on it link to FDA and to the NHS pharmacy service rather than restate the rules as ours. What we can say is what the cutter and the crusher do once that question is answered: a clean break on the score line, or a powder fine enough for a spoonful of applesauce.

Since 1984, which is 42 years of the same problem: a dose that has to be taken at the right time, by a person who has other things to think about. The useful part of that is not the anniversary but its consequence: the weekly box that sits on a counter today closes the same way the first one did, and a person who learned the lids on a parent’s box in the nineties can fill their own without reading anything.