Don’t let your next trip to the pharmacy turn into a tragedy
Lee Hudson was 82 years old and had survived just about everything — right until a routine trip to a pharmacy killed her.
You see, Lee thought she was picking up a prescription for allergy meds. But what she got instead was a powerful blood pressure drug that shut down her kidneys.
We’ve been told for years that these types of pharmacy errors are rare — the kind of thing that almost never happens.
But, unfortunately, that’s just not true.
A recent study proves that pharmacies are handing out the wrong doses (and sometimes the wrong drugs) up to 800 million times a year.
And taking a few extra moments when you pick up that next Rx could save your life or the life of someone you care about.
A pharmacist might be filling up to 25 prescriptions in a single hour — and that’s one of the reasons so many mistakes are made.
One study revealed that an error is made in one out of every five prescriptions. We’re talking about people leaving with drugs they were never prescribed or mega-doses that can cause heart attacks, strokes, or worse.
And here’s the really scary part. There were more than 4 billion prescriptions filled last year, so we’re talking about 800 million mistakes.
That’s a tragedy waiting to happen. And if you’re on “auto refill,” checking what they give you or having that “talk” with your pharmacist probably never even crosses your mind.
But you’ll realize why that talk is so important when you understand the kind of common mistakes that occur every day:
- Your drug label could have inaccurate directions. You might just assume your doctor has upped your dose, when he really hasn’t.
- Your name is on the bag, but it has someone else’s drug bottle inside.
- You’re handed an auto refill med that has a serious interaction with a new drug you’re taking.
- You’re simply given the wrong drug. This kind of error can be deadly. Yet it can easily happen, because lots of drugs have similar names — and a pharmacy puts them on the shelf in alphabetical order.
That kind of drug mix-up happened recently to a woman in Washington D.C.
Her auto refill looked almost identical to what she had been receiving. The container, which should have had vials of B12 liquid inside, looked the same too.
But instead of getting B12, she was given a similar-sounding drug used to resuscitate patients who go into cardiac arrest. And if her son, who had medical training, hadn’t noticed the mix-up, she could have died.
But what if you don’t have medical training? How can you stay safe?
First, don’t just walk away with that pharmacy bag. Open it at the pharmacy counter. Look inside and check for your name and the drug name and dose on the bottle. Has anything changed, does the drug look different? If anything appears unusual — anything — ask about it.
And even if it looks okay to you, when they ask you if you want to talk with the pharmacist — say yes. That’s important even if you’ve been taking a drug for some time. Show him the bottle and ask a question, any question at all about the drug or how you should take it.
Unbelievably, experts say that 80 percent of mistakes can be caught by just having that little chat.
It may seem silly, but those few extra moments can guarantee that you leave with what you came in for — and they might just save your life.
Sources:
“Lawsuit claims Houston woman died after pharmacy gave wrong meds” Dylan Baddour, January 7, 2016, Houston Chronical, chron.com
