Drug names need to be simplified for our patients ’ safety

The patient’s heart was beating dangerously slowly, and his EKG showed third-degree AV block: His heart’s electrical system had completely shut down in the middle.  If this were TV, the doctors would have started shouting “Epi!” and “Get the pads!” immediately.  This was real life, though, so his team decided to briefly sit down with him to try to determine why his heartbeat had slowed so dramatically.  Was it something that could be reversed without the need to surgically implant a pacemaker? Yes, as it turns out, the patient had been taking metoprolol for years, a blood-pressure pill with the potential to slow the heart in excessive doses — but his dose hadn’t changed recently.  However, he had been started on Lopressor three weeks ago at a different hospital for chest pain.  What the patient didn’t know was that Lopressor is a brand name for the metoprolol that he’d already been taking; as a result, he had inadvertently been taking double-dose metoprolol without realizing it.  Thankfully, this error was caught in time before the patient suffered lasting damage or underwent an unnecessary surgery. How could this mistake have happened?  Fragmented medical record systems between hospitals played an obvious role, but I am reminded again of the above story because of the confusion I regularly witness as a result of our two-named system for medications: the brand names used by drug companies, the generic names memorized by providers, and the profou...
Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog - Category: Journals (General) Authors: Tags: Meds Medications Source Type: blogs