Will I Be There The Next Morning? (Ingesting Past Validity Date Chinese Medicine)

And that is the question.

I've been unlucky enough to be hit by the flu for the past few days. Extremely sore throat, very runny nose, and constricted fits of coughing from time to time. Its virtually rendered me weak, light headed and befuddled at the moment. This is likely brought about by the recent seasonal weather change, where throngs of people are being brought down by symptoms such as mine. In my office alone, there are at least 4 infected.. which was most likely been started by our three hardworking lead managers in different areas of the office - the Admin, IT and Accounts Manager - a week earlier.

I've thought that working out for some time would leave me free from this, but I guess being active doesn't necessarily mean becoming rock iron solid repellant against bacteria and viruses. Oh well. I can only dream.

To alleviate my condition in the office, I remembered a chinese medicine I've previously bought a year ago... I thought, considering that expiry dates usually range from 2-3 years validity, this particular chinese medicine should still be valid for consumption. Turns out it isn't. The outer tag clearly says "Expiry Date: 2004-12-01". Should I still attempt to ingest it?

Ok, I know normally we shouldn't be consuming expired products. I've had my share of extreme discomfort and slight vomitting a few months ago when I gulped in milk that said "best before [today's date]". I figured, it should mean I can still ingest it today, but not tomorrow... and well, how wrong I was. There was another case a year or two ago when I opened a pack of ready-to-go oat cereal (this time this pack didn't have any expiry date on it so I wrongly thought that it was fairly recent batch) which caused me to regularly squirt out a very-interesting-yet-very-horrible projectile barf for over 8 hours. Not a pretty sight (But its facinating fact on what the human body can do to get rid of poisonous, non-human friendly material).

The medicine is called "Sanshedan Chuanbei Ye"(三蛇胆川贝液) in which main ingredients are - take this - Snake's bile and Fritillariae. (What the heck is a Fritillariae? The snake bile part sounds "cool" though :P) Its generally used to relive cough and eliminate sputum. Extremely sweet (must be used to mask the snake bile). Its usually packed in small miniture bottles, and you stick a hard straw in to break the thin aluminum top. I'll get a picture one of these days. In any case, this is what my mom used to pass along to me when I was still young and had a cough, and I bought myself one box (6 bottles) a year ago. My mom usually bought the 12 pack ones. I used to see her "stocks" of it at home.. and there were piles and piles of boxes of this, so I figured that sometime in the past she's probably had me ingest past-validity of this sort of medicine (Knowing my mom, yes, she'd do that. Why'd you think I grew up living in the clouds and my head screw a bit loose?)

I also asked a lady coworker (much older than me), who's almost like a mother figure for me at the office, and asked for her opinion. She also said that it shouldn't be a problem, since she's had the same experience with a chinese doctor who also gave out "past validity" medicine back when she was still in Canada. I figured, two moms, all of their kids still alive and breathing? I guess that's ok....

In any case, I took a gulp this morning, despite the past expiration date.

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