Drug mistakes hurt 1.5 million yearly

[Celebration]

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0607210142jul21,1,6770855.story?coll=chi-newsnationworld-hed

At least 1.5 million Americans are injured or killed every year by medication errors at a direct cost of billions of dollars, according to a report issued Thursday by the Institute of Medicine.

For hospitalized patients, the report said that on average one medication error per day is caused by confusion in drug names, wrong doses, failure to deliver drugs and a host of other problems.

The report is a follow-up to a 1999 report from the institute, which is part of the National Academy of Sciences. That report outlined all medical errors and said up to 98,000 people are killed each year as a result of medical errors--7,000 as a result of medication errors.

"We were initially quite surprised by the number of mistakes, but the more we heard, the more convinced we were that these are actually serious underestimates," said panel member Dr. Kevin Johnson of Vanderbilt University.

[newburgh]

1. A Drugstore on Every Corner- A Drug Ad in Every Media

When drugs' direct effects are misrepresented as "side effects" and advertising agencies are driving sales instead of doctors. When doctors, or even the drug companies themselves, don't know or even care about the interaction of all the different drugs and the FDA is doing nothing about it as they are staffed with future and past drug industry lackies. What's the "news"? I would say this is a major underestimate. But who's listening anyway, everyone's already drugged up.

[Warpy]

2. Drugs are selective poisons and must be used cautiously

The absolute WORST ethical blunder Congress has made in healthcare has been to allow Big Pill to advertise directly to patients. The lists of symptoms are so general that they fit nearly everyone in the population, so we have healthy people clamoring for these poisons they don't need. This is great for Big Pill's profits, terrible for public health.

The more pills people take, the more likelihood they'll screw em up.

I find the numbers "hurt" to be a bit presumptive, though. Most write ups for medication errors do NOT involve patient injury. The study seems to presume that they are injured. I've seen a couple of real lulus of med errors, too, mainly due to time errors and drug companies naming completely different medications closely or packaging completely different medications in very similar shapes, sizes, colors and prints. This is begging for error in understaffed hospitals where everyone is rushed all the time.

Most hospitals are going to electronic formats for prescription, bypassing the often difficult manual transcription of scribbled orders. That will certainly help. Unit dosing is also helping. However, until the address the working conditions on paitent floors, errors will continue to be made by rushed and exhausted people.

My advice to people in the hospital is get to know your medications. Look at everything in that pill cup and make sure it's the same stuff you've gotten at the same time yesterday. If it isn't, question it. Nothing is scarier to a nurse than a patient who tosses a whole cup of pills down his throat without looking to see what's in it.