Here’s a handy life hack or all my spoonie, arthritic and / or dyspraxic friends out there who struggle to open the %$#@! medication bottles dispensed with push-down-and-turn child-safety caps (even when you don’t have young people around).
This hack works with those bottles that have a sort of sliding inside cap.
You know, the one you tried removing, only to discover that the outside cap now no longer fits on the bottle. Cut To Scene: pliers and mangled inside cap, feeble chair-arm thumping, weeping, sore hands, and tiny pills escaping everywhere.
The beauty of this approach is its simplicity. All you need are a tack and a pusher. The tack might be some thumbtacks / drawing pins; I found upholstery tacks worked better on my medicine bottles. For the pusher, either a strong thumb or spoon suffices.
Push the tack into the [outside] top of the cap, halfway between the center and the edge. That’s it.
NOTE: make sure the point of the tack is long enough to pierce well into the inside cap.
Because my thumbtacks weren’t long enough we used the upholstery tacks, which just peeked through the inside. I decided this wouldn’t be too much of a safety hazard for myself. Otherwise one could plug over the pokey bit with say, a bit of the red wax from a Gouda cheese, or Sugru™.
Two medication bottles in front of a weekly pill-minder. The left bottle is open, with the upside-down lid showing a tack point barely poking through. The right bottle is closed, showing a tack inserted halfway between the center and edge.
This bottle-tack-hack originates from the Instructable “How to Make Evil Childproof Caps Easy to Open” by SFHandyman. His article explains how to simplify other types of caps, such as the squeeze-and-turn, line-up-arrows et cetera.
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