He Took the Wrong Medication

More than 1.3 million people take the wrong medication every year and close to 100,000 of those die.

While you may not have experienced a pharmaceutical error where you
got the wrong drug, or the right drug but you reacted badly to it, or a
new medication when combined with what you were already taking caused a
serious side effect, errors like this happen every day. Some of these
errors are not critical. On the other hand some of them may be deadly.

Not many people realize this, but medication errors are considered
to be medical malpractice, largely because they have the potential to
cause extremely serious injuries or death. Incidents like this can cost
up to $72 billion every year – a staggering amount of money wasted on
preventable pharmacy errors. Ask a Cleveland malpractice lawyer about the kinds of cases he deals with and you might be surprised at the answer.

A pharmacy error happens when a patient is handed the wrong medicine
or given the incorrect dose of their prescribed medication. Other areas
where mistakes happen are when the doctor writes out an illegible
prescription, when the medication isn’t labeled correctly or when
medicines that shouldn’t be mixed are taken together. Mistakes like
this are quite easy to make if the pills are the same color, size or
shape; if the names are similar or if the abbreviations on the
prescriptions for the number of times or quantity to take them are
wrong. If you think something like this has happened to you, contact a Cleveland medical malpractice lawyer.

Let’s say a prescription required a certain number of units of the
medicine to be given every four hours and the “U” looked like an O.
Obviously this would affect how much medication the patient was given
and perhaps have the potential to cause an inadvertent overdose. All it
takes is one small oversight in handing out meds and the consequences
could be a Cleveland medical malpractice lawsuit.

There are ways to reduce the likelihood of this happening and people
need to be more alert and aware of everything they are ingesting. This
becomes more of a problem with seniors who may not understand what they
are taking and why, and place an enormous amount of trust in their
caregivers.

The first place to start to prevent any pharmacy errors is to check
and re-check the medication with your physician after you have a
prescription filled. While it may seem like you’re a being nuisance,
it’s better to be safe than sorry. Asking questions that may avert a
potential drug reaction is far better than having to find a Cleveland
medical malpractice lawyer to right a wrong.

If you can’t read the handwriting, chances are the pharmacist will
have trouble making it out as well. Ask to have it re-written or
clarified before heading to the drugstore. Even though you know what
dose the doctor suggested and how many times to take it, write that
down on another piece of paper to check it against what you get from
the pharmacist. Don’t take anything you are handed until you check it
against the information you have.

Just because you may get medications and are told to use them
according to the directions on the package, doesn’t mean something
can’t go wrong. If you have a bad reaction, then something is obviously
amiss. If you feel you have been the victim of pharmacy error, contact
a Cleveland medical malpractice lawyer to discuss your case.

Christopher Mellino is a Cleveland Malpractice Lawyer specializing
in Cleveland Medical Malpractice cases in Ohio. To learn more about Cleveland medical malpractice, Cleveland malpractice lawyer, Cleveland medical malpractice, Cleveland medical malpractice lawyer, visit Christophermellino.com.