Prescription for disaster - Side effects from prescription medicines - Brief Article

Better Nutrition, August, 2003

According to the results of a new study, side effects from prescription medicines plague one in four patients--and when side effects do surface, most doctors fail to act. The findings sound an alarm to the millions of Americans who take prescription drugs each year.

Among the side effects noted by researchers, 13 percent were serious, such as low blood pressure or internal bleeding; and 39 percent were preventable, such as cases where a drug was given to a patient even though he or she was known to be allergic to it.

In cases where side effects were preventable, patients were given the wrong drug 45 percent of the time; prescribed the wrong dosage 10 percent of the time; and told to take a drug too frequently 10 percent of the time.

The study was conducted at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and published in the April 16, 2003 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine.

Previous estimates suggested that nearly 5 percent of all hospital admissions--more than 1 million per year--are the result of drug side effects, More than 3 billion prescriptions were dispensed in the United States in 2002.