There is a popular joke about doctors is that their hand-writing can only be understand by their spouse or a chemist. If the chemist find it difficult to decipher medicines listed on a prescription, who’ll bear the joke. Will you ? Surely not.
According to a report by Institute of medicine (IOM) in July 2006, medication errors affect more than 1.5 million Americans each year in hospitals alone. Nearly 7000 deaths attributed to medication errors, including prescribing or giving wrong drugs. Here we’re talking about US where drugs are only dispensed by pharmacists, if converted in Indian figures, I am sure count could go much higher.
Some drugs can get substituted for each-other because their names are read/sound similar. Some of them are:
• Arkamine (for blood pressure) and Artamine (for rheumatoid arthritis)
• Isoprine (an intravenous given to increase blood pressure) and Isoptine
• Digene (antacid) and Digoxin (for congestive heart failure
• Fludac (for depression) and Flunac (for anti-fungal)
• Magna (for respiratory tract infection) and Magfa(for depression and anxiety)
• Anxit (for anxiety) and Axhit (for malaria)
Errors can happen due to wrongly spelt names , decimal errors, writing style and abbreviations (hoping list doesn’t go on length). In 2006, in Olympia (US) ,a law had banned doctors from writing prescription in cursive hand- writing. Wheresoever there is no such law, there is a need to take Precautions .
A matter of thinking twice……………
