WASHINGTON (AP) – Have you seen the MadTV commercial parody Levitol/TROL?! It’s a hilarious take on navigating the prescription drug landscape with a physician. But sadly enough, a letter or two off and the results could be deadly.
Take the generic drug clonidine for high blood pressure. There’s also Klonopin for seizures and colchicines for gout medicine.
Mixing up drug names because they look or sound alike - like this trio - is among the most common types of medical mistakes, and it can be deadly. Now new efforts are aiming to stem the confusion, and make patients more aware of the risk.
Nearly 1,500 commonly used drugs have names so similar to at least one other medication that they've already caused mix-ups, says a major study by the U.S. Pharmacopeia, which helps set drug standards and promote patient safety.
Last week the influential group opened a tool that lets consumers and doctors easily check if they're using or prescribing any of these error-prone drugs… and what they might confuse them with. Try to spell or pronounce a few and it's easy to see how mistakes can happen. Did you mean the painkiller Celebrex or the antidepressant Celexa?
The Food and Drug Administration - which currently rejects more than a third of proposed names for new drugs because they're too similar to old ones - is preparing a pilot program that would shift more responsibility to manufacturers to guard against name confusion. The goal is to spell out how to better test for potential mix-ups before companies seek approval to sell their products.
At least 1.5 million Americans are estimated to be harmed each year from a variety of medication errors, and name mix-ups are blamed for a quarter of them.
Rarely does a company change a drug's name after it hits the market, although it's happened twice since 2005. The Alzheimer's drug Reminyl now is named Razadyne, after mix-ups, including two reported deaths, with the old diabetes drug Amaryl. The cholesterol pill Omacor is now named Lovaza, after mix-ups with blood-clotting Amicar.
And you can’t necessarily blame doctors' handwriting, which is often the subject of many jokes for being notoriously bad. A hurried pharmacist faced with alphabetized bottles on a shelf might grab the wrong one.
Are computerized prescriptions the cure? Nope. A doctor who e-prescribes still can click the wrong row on the alphabetized screen, picking the bone drug Actonel instead of the diabetes drug Actos.
Phone or fax can be even worse… static or smudged ink can turn the epilepsy drug Lamictal into the antifungal pill Lamisil.
Harder to measure but perhaps more common: the patient misspells or mispronounces one of his drugs, and a health worker assumes it's the schizophrenia drug Zyprexa, not the antihistamine Zyrtec.
"We've had cases where a health care professional repeats what they think the patient's on, and the patient thinks they must know what they're talking about and agrees," says USP's Cousins.
The best solution is to be vigilant.
- Check the tool against your current medications.
- Pay close attention when you get prescriptions filled and double-check the bottle at the counter.
- Question the pharmacist if the tablets look different than last time - it might just be a new generic.
- You can also ask your doctors to write the diagnosis on the prescription to further help pharmacists prevent errors. For example, write "for heart" next to "clonipine" and a pharmacist is less likely to grab similar-sounding gout pills.
