Recommended pill cutters (pill splitters)

by Rajnish (“Raj”) Mago, MD (bio)

Why do patients sometimes need to cut medication tablets?

– When titrating up the dose of a medication, for example, escitalopram 10 mg tablets, I often ask the patient to initially cut the tablet in half and take a half dose for the first few days. This tends to reduce side effects.

– Patients (or “society”) can usually save money on expensive medications by using a higher-strength tablet and cutting it in half. For example, lurasidone 80 mg tablets can be cut in half if the patient is on 40 mg/day.

But it is not easy to decide which pill cutter to buy because hundreds of them are available. Most people would not know what criteria to use when selecting from among the pill cutters that are available.

What to look for in a good pill cutter

I have been surprised to find some patients trying to cut tablets with a kitchen knife and complaining that the tablets get crushed while being cut! In my personal opinion (and experience), it is better to use a pill cutter.

But I have also found that some pill cutters are problematic. A good pill-cutter should have the following characteristics:

1. The blade should be sharp. If not, it won’t make a clean cut and may crush the tablet.

2. It should hold the tablet firmly in position so that it can be cut precisely.

3. It should work using a hinge so that it can be used to quickly cut one tablet after another. Don’t all of them work this way? No, one of the pill cutters I tested requires removing the top, placing a tablet, then replacing the top. This has to be done for every tablet!

Recommended pill cutters

After carefully reading the reviews on Amazon.com, I identified 4 pill cutters that seemed likely to be excellent. I bought all 4 of them and personally tested them repeatedly. Two of the 4 worked really well (while the other 2 did not), and I can confidently recommend them. Click on the links below to see these two products on Amazon.

Apex Ultra Pill Cutter

Pill Splitter With Retracting Blade Guard – For Cutting Small Pills or Large Pills In Half

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JohnBee Pill Cutter

Best Pill Cutter with Shield for Small or Large Pills – Keychain Pill Holder As Bonus

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Pill cutters that I DON’T recommend

To my surprise, 2 of the 4 pill cutters that I selected and bought because they were highly rated on Amazon.com did NOT work well.

1. “Apex Pill Splitter” is another pill cutter from the same company (Apex) that makes one of the pill cutters that I recommended above. But I found that this one tended to crush the pills rather than cutting them cleanly.

2. “The Equadose Pill Cutter V2” was tested by me and is not recommended for more than one reason, but mainly because, instead of a hinge action, it has a lid that needs to be taken off for each tablet, replaced, and pressed. So, it is unnecessarily time-consuming to use. Also, I did not find it to cut tablets into “perfect halves” as was claimed on the sales page.

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Are there pill cutters that you have personally used or tested and either strongly recommend or recommend against? Please do share your opinion and recommendation with us by posting it at the bottom of this page (under “Leave a Reply”).

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Disclosure: The links above are Amazon affiliate links that support us at no additional cost to the purchaser.

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Related Pages

Tips on reducing the cost of medications by using higher-strength pills

Which tablets are actually extended-release formulations and so should not be cut?

Recommended pill cutters (pill splitters)

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