Prescription Mistakes Cost Millions of Lives If your stomach is upset over a period of time, your doctor might prescribe Zantac for you. It’s a drug that helps reduce stomach acid, and may even help heal a stomach ulcer. Suppose, instead, you have allergy-like symptoms. Your eyes itch, your nose is runny, and your chest is congested. Your doctor might prescribe Zyrtec, an antihistamine that may alleviate those symptoms. But take a look at those two drug names: Zantac and Zyrtec. When drug names are so similar, doctors and pharmacists may confuse them, and prescribe or dispense the wrong one. There are hundreds of cases of similar spellings and/or pronunciations being monitored by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for possible problems. Others include Aciphex (for stomach reflux) and Aricept (for memory), Allegra (for allergies) and Viagra (for erectile dysfunction) or Fosomax (for bone) and Flomax (for veins and arteries). It’s easy to see how they could be confused! There are other types of medication errors, too. Mistakes may stem from incorrect dosage, meaning too much or too little of the drug is provided. Bad interactions, when a patient already takes a drug that conflicts with a newly prescribed drug, cause problems, too. Or a patient might be given a drug he is allergic too, whether or not the doctor knows about the allergy. No doctor or pharmacist intentionally makes a mistake. But when medication errors are made, it’s we patients who suffer. In extreme cases, patients die. According to the Institute of Medicine, medication errors kill more then 400,000 Americans each year in hospitals alone. That doesn’t even account for errors made outside the hospital. Why so many mistakes? Usually it’s human error. Doctors, notorious for bad handwriting, may choose the right drug, but the pharmacist may read it incorrectly. Alternatively, the doctor may get two names mixed up, and the pharmacist dispenses what he reads, not knowing it’s the wrong drug. Or the pharmacist mixes up the names. Sometimes the prescription gets transferred by phone from the doctor’s office to the pharmacy, but the people making or receiving the phone calls make mistakes. How can you be sure you are getting the right prescription? It’s up to us as patients to be sure we get the right medicine in the right dosage. There are some simple steps you can take to make that confirmation. The next Every Patient’s Advocate column will list those steps for you. (Link here for an example of a poorly written prescription from Harvard Medical Schools' hospital.) Link here for Part II of this discussion. © 2006 Trisha Torrey Return to Main List of Columns
| 
