Pharmacists may be switching your medication
posted in - Health tips, - Palmdoc |It happens all the time, as MSNBC reports
When you hand a pharmacist a prescription, you expect to get the medication your doctor ordered. But because of a perfectly legal loophole in rules that govern how drugs are dispensed, you may not — and the consequences can be dire.
A generic may or may not be as good as the original, certainly not all generics are equal.
The worse case scenario I’ve encountered in Malaysia is a pharmacist recommending a completely different drug, e.g. a patient with Essential Thrombocytosis requiring Hydroxyurea, gets a recommendation for Aspirin or Plavix instead.
Unfortunately, bioequivalence studies aren’t available (nor mandatory in Malaysia) for many generics out there so there is a bit of hit and miss if a generic given as a substitute. So consumers beware.
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June 3rd, 2009 at 4:13 pm
What happens when, or if, a pharmacist switches a prescription of Plavix for aspirin, and the patient then develops a severe allergic reaction to the aspirin?
Of course, the allergic reaction would also have happened if the initial prescription had in fact been for aspirin, BUT since the switch was made NOT by the prescribing doctor, WHO bears responsibility in a scenario like this?
June 4th, 2009 at 2:49 am
Yea they do that here, too (switching brand name to generic). The intentions are good since this saves patients a lot of money (generic simvastatin only 4-5 bucks for a month). I agree though that the bioavailability may differ so if brand is needed we only need to write ‘dispense as written’ in the script.
Never is it ever acceptable though to switch from one type completely to another.
June 4th, 2009 at 8:17 am
My most recent experience is that of nurses in a ward giving Zantac to a patient with HIV thinking that 3TC written in the prescription form stands for Zantac instead of Lamivudine.
In this case, I think the responsibility lies with the prescribing doctor who should have written the full pharmacological name of the drug instead of its abbreviation. Because of this one silly act, the patient was deprived of anti-retroviral cover for 2 weeks!