This tool shows mechanism, verdict, and alternative data only — not patient-specific advice. A “can crush” result is a general guide, not a guarantee for your exact product: the same ingredient can differ by brand, manufacturer, and formulation. Data comes from U.S. drug labels and covers a limited set of medicines — if a drug isn’t listed, that is not a green light to crush it. Always confirm with your pharmacist or physician before altering how a medication is administered.
About Crushable
A formulation-mechanism guide to tablet crushing and capsule splitting — built for patients, caregivers, and nursing staff who need a clear answer, not a liability disclaimer.
Who Built This
Crushable is built by Jay, a licensed pharmacist in Korea. His background is in industrial pharmacy and drug-delivery research, and he works as a senior researcher at a pharmaceutical company.
One of the most repeated practical questions in care settings — hospitals, nursing homes, home caregivers — is whether a given tablet can be crushed or a capsule opened. The answer depends entirely on the drug's formulation mechanism, not the drug itself. A modified-release matrix that controls absorption timing, an enteric coating that prevents gastric acid damage, an osmotic pump that meters release over 24 hours: crushing any of these destroys the mechanism. The drug still reaches the patient — but in a way the manufacturer did not design or test.
Crushable encodes that formulation logic and pairs it with cited source data so you can understand why, not just whether.
What "Trust" Means Here
Crushable does not claim pharmacist review of every individual database entry. That would be misleading — the database contains dozens of drugs compiled from structured sources, and claiming individual pharmacist sign-off on each entry would overstate my personal involvement.
Instead, trust is grounded in two things:
- Source firewall. Every entry must cite a recognized source. Today that means an OpenFDA drug label (for the crush / split / open-capsule verdicts) or a general pharmaceutics reference (for the immediate-release baseline and the formulation mechanism). ISMP and SPC/EMC are planned corroborating sources, not yet used. Entries without a source citation do not ship — a build-time validator enforces this before the data goes live.
- Mechanism transparency. Each drug card explains the formulation mechanism — what it does, why that mechanism makes crushing dangerous or safe. You can follow the reasoning yourself, not just take a verdict on faith.
Pharmacist notes — personal clinical commentary written by Jay — appear only when Jay has written them directly. They are never AI-generated. Most entries will not have a pharmacist note; that absence is honest, not a gap.
Data Sources
OpenFDA Drug Labels
The U.S. FDA publishes structured drug label data via the openFDA API. Labels include dosage form descriptions, administration instructions, and warnings about tablet modification. This is the primary source for formulation type and mechanism data.
ISMP Do Not Crush List
The Institute for Safe Medication Practices publishes a widely referenced list of oral medications that should not be crushed. ISMP is a planned corroborating reference — the current dataset is not yet cross-cited against it, so no entry carries an ISMP source today.
Summary of Product Characteristics (SPC/EMC)
European medicines regulators publish SPCs with detailed pharmaceutical form and administration information. Planned for drugs where UK/EU labeling is clearer than the FDA label; not yet used in the current dataset.
The Source Firewall
Every entry in the Crushable database goes through a build-time validator before it is published. The validator checks that every verdict — crush, split, open capsule — has a source citation attached. If a source field is missing, the build fails and the entry is not published.
This means the database may be smaller than competitors who fill in verdicts by inference or assumption. That is intentional. An honest "not in our database" is better than a fabricated verdict.
What This Tool Is Not
Crushable provides mechanism and source data. It does not provide patient-specific advice. The same drug may behave differently depending on the individual patient's condition, other medications, and how the drug is being used clinically.
Always confirm with your pharmacist or prescribing physician before changing how a medication is administered. This is especially important for patients with swallowing difficulties, feeding tubes, or complex polypharmacy regimens.
Part of Vibed Lab
Crushable is part of Vibed Lab, a collection of focused tools built by Jay. Other projects include ClearRx (drug interaction checker) and LAI Bridge (rat-to-human LAI exposure predictor).