Prescribing errors

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Prescription For Disaster: Dangers In Your Medicine Cabinet Thomas J. Moore See book keywords and concepts

But shouldn't we at least insist on gathering data about the most frequent prescribing errors in order to prevent them? To think about prescription drugs in terms of a safety system is to understand that modern society has been unnecessarily careless about/he most dangerous thing we do. CHAPTER EIGHT Pain By 9 a.m. it was already clear that this would be a major event in Washington D.C., a city where a yawn greets an event of merely moderate importance. Just to get a seat, the drug company lobbyists had paid students to stand in line since dawn.

First, we need better-informed and more vigilant consumers, with a better chance of getting prescribing errors fixed. Later chapters in this book will explain what consumers can do. Physicians are sensitive to what they hear from patients. Second, while few people in this era would suggest that the federal government ought to regulate doctors' prescribing practices, it should collect information about the most dangerous and common problems.

The third major problem, the focus of the previous chapter, is prescribing errors by doctors. It is ironic that society has taken away from consumers the right to select their own drugs—and control their own bodies—because drugs are so powerful and risky it requires an expert or learned intermediary. Yet when the performance of these experts is examined, error rates of 15 percent, 20 percent, and even 50 percent of prescriptions written were found. In any reasonably managed safety system, the question ought to be how far below 1 percent the error rate can be reduced.

Consumers rarely know when they are victims of prescribing errors. Even when they do learn of a medical mistake, they rarely blame the doctor-— unless the error was very serious.24 The medical literature provides compelling evidence of prescription error, but apparently most doctors think someone else must be making all those mistakes. (This is one reason why monitoring the results is the key to eliminating errors. A doctor who erroneously believes he is making few prescription errors will quickly learn otherwise.

It shouldn't be more difficult to help physicians make fewer prescribing errors and persuade consumers to be more alert than to get 35 million children to wear their bicycle helmets. P A R T THREE WHAT YOU CAN DO CHAPTER TWELVE The Skeptical Consumer drug safety begins with a sensible attitude. Something buried deep in the ancient ritual of taking medicine seems to provoke the unhealthy extremes—either an unquestioning faith in medication, or an unreasoning fear of harm. Any readers with a blind faith in drugs probably put this book down long ago.

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