Aunty Jabou,
You are doing the right thing to cross check all prescriptions you or your
family is given. The doctors and pharmacists are so human and at most
overwhelmed by work just like any person in any profession.
However, most of these mistakes are small things easily over sighted like
writing "left" instead of "right." And this is even possible with a mere
ordering of surgery or reading an X-ray. There are a lot of precautions that
doctors, pharmacists and nurses takes to avoid a lot of these things, but the
patient should always cross check. And yes there are a lot of computerized
systems that could help to detect an over dosage of prescriptions and drug
interactions, but they are humanly manned, so they are not free from mistakes
either and with the Millennium coming, I hope not, but I can tell you that
some pharmacies are undergoing a lot of computer changes that mistakes are
more likely to happen.
And the other advise to all the patients is to tell the doctors what med.
they might be taking at the time of prescription and it would help too if
they tell the pharmacist at the time of filling their prescriptions. This
would make it easier to detect of any interactions and adverse reactions of
the different medicines.
One thing to keep in mind and not be very scared when one goes to pick up a
prescription from the pharmacy is to see that the medicine they are given is
different from what is prescribed. There are a lot of medicines with
different names, so just ask and do not panic. A lot of health Insurance
companies would not pay for certain brand names and the pharmacist might not
explain that to you, they will just go ahead and give the same medicines to
you for the same purpose, but that decision is made by one's insurance
carrier and not the doctor. Also the Pharmacy might give one a brand name
because that is the one they carry instead of the actual one one's doctor
prescribed. This is supposed to be explained to everyone, but it rarely is as
I have encountered a lot.

Ousman Jallow Bojang.

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