Don’t buy medicines without receipt

With the capital in the grip of vector-borne diseases such as Chikungunya and dengue, shops selling medicines are as crowded as hospitals and clinics these days.

With the capital in the grip of vector-borne diseases such as Chikungunya and dengue, shops selling medicines are as crowded as hospitals and clinics these days. So I would advise consumers to be extra cautious while buying medicines and make sure that the chemist dispenses the right medication.

HT Image

Instances of chemists misreading a prescription are not rare. In Mumbai, a consumer almost died of hypoglycaemia because the pharmacist misread the prescription given for treating flatulence and sold him instead, an anti-diabetic drug that had an almost similar sounding name. Some years ago, the consumer court awarded compensation to a consumer who suffered the deleterious effects of consuming a strong medication for epilepsy. The consumer had been prescribed a drug for hypertension, but the pharmacist had instead sold a medicine for epilepsy. And here, it was not even a case of similar sounding name. The chemist had mixed up the prescriptions of two customers!

So besides such carelessness and similar sounding names, prescription errors could stem from illegible handwriting of the doctor, look-alike packaging, poor printing on aluminium strips by pharmaceutical companies, chemists trying to identify the medication by its appearance or where it is stored rather than properly reading the name and even on account of drug packets getting mixed up at the sale counter, particularly when there is a large number of consumers waiting impatiently to buy their medicines.

So the first step is to get your prescription right. The generic name not only helps you get the right medication, but also gives you a choice of brands and prices. However, you may still get flummoxed by the abbreviations used by doctors with regard to the dosage and a bad handwriting may still result in buying the wrong strength. I was reading the other day about how a doctor’s abbreviation for ‘continue all medications’ (Ct all) written after the list of medicines lead to the pharmacist dispensing Cital, a urinary alkalizer. Similarly, if you do not follow abbreviations such as SR (Sustained Release), ER (Extended Release) and if the chemist too ignores it, you may not get the medicine the doctor ordered.

So do not hesitate to ask the doctor about the prescription, its strength, dosage, besides information such as whether it is to be taken before food or after food and whether there are any medicines or food with which it should not be mixed. This information is extremely important and faced with a number of patients, the doctor may not remember to tell you this, so ask.

A few years ago, the ministry of health in Malaysia had prepared a guide for pharmacists on ‘handling look alike and sound alike medications’ to prevent prescription errors. Some of them are relevant even today. It tells the pharmacist to always cross-check the medication prescribed with the diagnosis mentioned at the top of the doctor’s prescription. This eliminates, to a large extent, mistakes in dispensing medicines. It also advises chemists to read the label carefully and the strength of the medication and double check with the prescription, rather than relying on the visual recognition and the place where the medicine is generally stored. Since there are medicines with similar sounding names and identical looking packages, this leads to medication errors, the guide says.

Every chemist has to give a bill, giving details of the medicine. So the process of issuing a bill too will ensure the correctness of the medicine sold. This is also the time when unscrupulous chemists may try to palm off spurious and expired drugs. So here again, a cash receipt will prevent such mischief. And remember, a cash receipt is your proof of purchase in case something goes wrong!