Dangerous drug combos commonly prescribed by doctors

Will an Rx ‘blunder’ land you in the hospital?

Who can you rely on to protect you from being prescribed a potentially devastating or even deadly drug combo?

You would hope that it would be your trusted doctor.

Then, of course, there’s your pharmacist, whose computerized system supposedly has built-in safeguards against such errors.

But the truth of the matter is that these types of mistakes – or as Medscape calls them, “prescribing blunders” — happen all the time.

There’s only one person who is the final roadblock, so to speak, when it comes to stopping one of those serious blunders in its tracks.

You.

Thankfully, you don’t need a degree in medicine or chemistry to spot one of these all-too-common oversights. In fact, just taking three easy steps can help keep you or a loved one safe from a life-altering slip-up.

When Medscape, the leading website for physicians and healthcare professionals, did a review of common mistakes made in dispensing prescriptions, what they found gave new meaning to the importance double-checking before taking any drug!

The article revealed just how easy it is for a worst-case scenario to occur.

I’m talking about rupturing your Achilles tendon… a devastating injury to your kidneys… or a potentially fatal internal hemorrhage… all the result of doctors not paying close enough attention to the effects of mixing certain drugs.

Drugs are certainly dangerous enough all on their own, but put the wrongs ones together… and you’ve got a prescription for disaster.

Take the first example on the Medscape list: prescribing a class of antibiotics called fluoroquinolones (FQs) along with steroids.

You’re probably more familiar with some of the names these FQs are sold under, such as Cipro or Levaquin. They’re a group of the most commonly prescribed antibiotics in the U.S.

As we’ve told you over the years, they are also incredibly dangerous meds. Even the FDA required drugmakers to add a black-box warning about the risk of tendonitis and tendon ruptures over a decade ago.

But take them along with a corticosteroid such as prednisone, and your risk of that tendon rupture is tripled. That particular combo also ups your chance of suffering an agonizing rupture of your Achilles tendon by over 40 percent.

Then, there’s the triple threat of combining commonly prescribed diuretics (a.k.a. water pills) with ACE or ARB drugs (used to treat high blood pressure and heart disease) and your everyday OTC pain meds known as NSAIDs.

These are meds that millions take every day, such as the ACE drugs Lotensin or Vasotec or ARBs such as Benicar and Diovan. Of course, NSAIDs include popular pain meds such as Motrin, Advil, and even aspirin.

The danger here is that those blood pressure/heart drugs can interact with NSAIDs, raising the risk of serious injury to your kidneys by over 30 percent.

But the worst of these “blunders” would have to be the common practice of prescribing three blood-thinning drugs to patients undergoing stent procedures to open a blocked artery.

You would think that the bleeding risk from simply one of these anticoagulant meds would be enough to contend with. But this “triple therapy,” despite being proven as unnecessary and dangerous time and time again, continues to be quite common – putting patients at risk for a major bleed or stroke.

And those are just three examples of how you can innocently walk into drug-interaction trap that can be life-threatening.

The simplest solution, of course, is to not start up on any meds unless absolutely, positively necessary. But if you’re taking more than one drug at a time, put these three steps into action before you pop even the first pull:

#1. Know exactly the name of the drug you’ve been prescribed (including its generic name) before you leave your doctor’s office.

#2. Do your own research before taking any med. There is loads of information online from well-respected websites, including drug labels and warning notices put out by the FDA.

#3. You know that information packet that comes stapled to every prescription? By reading it, you’ll have another chance to make sure that you’re not only getting the right drug, but to check for any interactions your doctor or pharmacist may have missed.

Certainly, it’s much easier just to take the lines of least resistance and assume that you’ve been safely prescribed a medication that will help your problem. But there’s too much at stake to simply make that assumption.

And by going that extra mile, you could keep a blunder from turning into a catastrophe.

“Common prescribing blunders: Are you making any of these?” Medscape, August 13, 2018, medscape.com