Prescription Mix-ups essays

Prescription Mix-ups essays When a person goes to the doctor and receives a prescription for medicine, the patient assumes the pharmacy will provide the right drug. That is usually the case, but sometimes the pharmacist cant read the doctors handwriting and may misinterpret what medicine is being prescribed. Also, it is the pharmacists job to ask the person if he is taking any other drugs, including over-the-counter products. The pharmacist has to do this to make sure the person is not mistakenly mixing drugs that can be harmful. Mix-ups are not common, but they do happen in the $103-billion-a-year prescription business. One major reason is that there are so many drugs that look or sound alike. Studies have shown that one to three percent of prescriptions dispensed have some kind of error. About 15,000 mistakes by pharmacists happened in 1998, according to estimates by Tony Grasha, a psychology professor at the University of Cincinnati who studied mistakes by pharmacists. About 2.8 billion prescriptions were filled in that year. If a person gets the wrong drug, it can be deadly. That is why the United States Pharmacopeia (USP), which sets standards for drugs, is running a voluntary hot line for health workers to report mix-ups. The USP has been able to find out which drugs are the easiest to confuse. Here are a couple: Accupril (taken for high blood pressure) and Accutane (for acne). Also, Zyrtec (an antihistamine) and Zyprexa (an antipsychotic). One of the problems, according to the Vice President of USP, Diane Cousins, is that drug companies have already worked their way through the alphabet, trademarking thousands of catchy names. She goes on to say in a Consumer Reports interview, How many combinations of five to seven letters starting with a Z are there that are easily pronounceable? The Journal of the American Medical Association reported that an older woman in a hospital emergency r...