To avoid making serious or fatal prescription medication errors, Chicago doctors need to have a vast knowledge of medications that are used to treat a variety of illnesses and other health concerns.
Doctors need to inform patients about the risks that are associated with prescription drugs, and they also need to know how prescription drugs could interact with other medications their patients may already be taking. When prescribing a drug, doctors should also review patients’ medical histories in order to determine whether patients have any allergies to medications or health problems that could be aggravated by medications. Additionally, doctors must be aware of new warnings regarding drugs before they prescribe medications.
If doctors fail to do these things, patients could suffer from serious complications and even risk death in some situations.
Some medications have been discovered to be dangerous. Currently, doctors are being warned about new risks that have been associated with the blood-thinning medication Pradaxa. These warnings cannot go ignored if doctors want to ensure patient safety when prescribing Pradaxa.
According to a recent study, the blood-thinning medication increases patients’ risks of suffering heart attacks, strokes and bleeding after heart valve surgery. The drug was tested on patients with mechanical heart valves.
Now, the FDA is warning doctors not to prescribe Pradaxa to patients who have mechanical heart valves in order to protect patients from suffering serious or fatal complications that could be caused by the blood-thinning medication. Instead, physicians are instructed to think of alternative treatments for patients with all varieties of heart valves. Although patients who had valves made of natural body tissues were not included in the study, one doctor suggested that it would be best to still avoid prescribing Pradaxa in order to protect patients.
Source: MedPage Today, “FDA issues Pradaxa valve warning,” Chris Kaiser, Dec. 20, 2012
