1. codeine is an opiate, and opiates cause a histamine release from mast cells but its not IgE mediated so its not truly an allergy just the itching/redness part. Benadryl or claritin usually fixes this. Sometimes we switch to a different opiate and that does the job.
2. Medications should always be stored in a cool dry place. Cars and bathrooms are not ideal places for medications. Cars freeze and super heat in their respective months, and bathrooms are too moist. If you have a medication that needs to be refridgerated, do not freeze it.
3. Staph, nothing really except being clean. Ringworm possibly, you can pretreat or postreat yourself the same way I described before for athletes foot. I dont know how comfortable you are rubbing down with lotrimin or spraying down with tinactin all over, but its a possibility.
4. Generic drugs do have the same active ingredients as the brand names however the laws on them allow for a 20% window of Therapeutic equivalencey. So basically there is an 80%-120% window for generic medications to fall into. This may sound scary because lets say that you take 100mg of drug X, drug X now has a generic drug Y. Drug Y comes in 100mg dose as well, but actually you could be getting as little as 80mg or as much as 120mg. Now before people start losing it and demanding brand name medications, you have to remember that the brand name drug also has a window, and you dont get exactly 100mg in every dose. That being said the 20% window that generics have is not detrimental to your health or treatment. The only thing we suggest is that on narrow therapeutic window drugs (these are what we call drugs that have a narrow border between being healthy and toxic or what we call drugs that have a narrow window of effectiveness like seizure medications you are either seizure free on a dose or not there is no real inbetween) we suggest that patients do not abruptly switch. So if you are on drug X, and its a seizure medication, we do not suggest and abrupt change to drug Y. All that being said generic drugs are safe and effective, and are regulated just as stringently as brand name drugs. If we didnt have generic drugs in America, millions of people would go without treatment because of cost.
5. If your pills say take with a meal, then take with a meal. Milk is sometimes a good substitute, and drugs that can be taken with a meal or milk will usually say so. Other drugs that strictly must be taken with food i.e. griseofulvin will indicate that milk may not be enough. Grapefruit juice is not enough for a number of reasons. The first is that grapefruit juice does not offer the calories and fat that mild does, so it doesnt really constitute a meal, furthermore there are a number of drugs that interact with grapefruit/grapefruit juice causing drugs to rise in the body to toxic levels. Orange juice and other citrus juices are ok, just grapefruit juice (there is a specific enzyme in it which causes the interactions).
