Most people wouldn't put sour milk, rotten meat or mouldy bread near their mouth, but what about expired medicines?
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What about those headache tablets in your handbag, the eye drops you can't remember when you opened, last year's cold and flu tablets or that ointment which has been in your medicine cabinet for who knows how long?
It is almost impossible to know just by looking at a medication whether it has passed its use-by date, but experts say expiry dates for medications are just as, if not more, important to abide by than those, say, for food.
Associate Professor of Pharmacy Greg Kyle, from the University of Canberra's health faculty, said an expiry date was the final day the full potency and safety of a medication was guaranteed.
He said after an expiry date was reached, medications tended to degrade, meaning they became less effective and in some cases, unsafe.
"It's really the Russian roulette of it. Expiry dates are there for a reason," Dr Kyle said.
"The big question with looking at how products degrade is what they degrade to. There's a few things that degrade to other things that aren't very nice and those are the ones you've got to be really careful of if you push the expiry date.
"The safest way is when the expiry date is reached, take it back to the pharmacy and they can dispose of it in an appropriate way.
"You shouldn't take products past their expiry date and people are going to make their own decisions, but people need to make those decisions being aware of the information surrounding what that decision can mean.
"They need to ask some questions like what does it break down to? Can that cause any harm? If they choose to ignore the expiry date, that's when they need to be asking some of those questions."
He said it was also important to abide by expiry dates for antibiotics to ensure their effectiveness.
With eye drops it is particularly important to dispose of them if they have not been used within the recommended time frame.
"The recommendation with eye drops is to throw them out one month after you open them. It's a sterility thing because every time you squeeze a drop out, it's going to suck some air back into it. We don't live in a sterile environment and there's a chance that some contamination can get sucked back into the bottle," Dr Kyle said.
"The last thing we want to be doing is dropping some sort of bacterial fungal mix directly into our eye."
NPS MedicineWise phone line services manager Sarah Spagnardi said most questions about expiry dates related to medications taken infrequently or on an as-needs basis, such as cold and flu tablets.
"We find that people aren't really in the habit of checking the expiry date of products they're not using every day," she said.
She said it was not advisable for people to take expired medications.
"It's always better to play it safe – we can't always predict what the effect of an expired medicine might be and we certainly don't want people to take risks with their health."
Ms Spagnardi said people should always check the expiry date before taking any medicine they might not have used for a while.
Pharmacist Amanda Galbraith, one of the owners of Kambah Capital Chemist, said: "An expiry date is a protective mechanism.
"After a certain point in time, the medicine has degraded in quality, so you may not get the appropriate dose that's needed.
''Additionally some medicines, after they have expired, become not so safe for use. We want to make sure people are getting an appropriate dose that is as the product is supposed to be and that they are not taking anything that could be dangerous for them."
She encouraged people to periodically check their medicines and take any expired medications to their pharmacist to be disposed of safely. She said people should not dispose of medications in their bin or down the sink.
Dr Kyle recommended people keep a medication's original packaging as it had information such as the expiry date, batch number and the conditions it should be kept in.
Pharmaceutical Society of Australia national president Grant Kardachi said it was important for people to pay attention to expiry dates.
"Medicines may become less effective with time. There is (also) a danger they may break down to some other product that may cause unwanted and unnecessary side effects in a patient. Those are a couple of reasons why going past the expiry has some dangers with it."
He encouraged people to speak to their pharmacist if they had any questions.
Mr Kardachi said people should also ensure they stored their medications correctly.
"If you're carrying a medication around with you all the time or if it's in the glove-box of your car or that type of thing, extremes of temperature can hasten the degradation potentially of medication," he said.
"If we're going to get the maximum benefit of that medication through to the expiry date, it's important also to keep it near the temperatures it's meant to be kept at."
If people have questions about their medications, they can ring the NPS Medicines Line on 1300 633 424.
