The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality has information for preventing diseases that are the top killers in the US: Heart Disease, Cancer and Stroke. Not smoking, healthy diet, and regualr visits to your doctor of course top the list. Click below for more info
According to some experts, medication errors cause more deaths per year than car crashes, breast cancer or AIDS. The medical, nursing and pharmacy professions as well as your local hospital are all working very hard to minimize medication errors, but you need to do your part as well.
A recent article on this subject ends with the following advice, “Patients should understand their medications, maintain their own medication records, and take responsibility for monitoring them. Patients need to tell their providers how new medications have affected them, and the physicians need to listen.”
You should keep an up to date list of all of your medications, the dosages taken and the condition they are being used to treat. You should also know the most common and most serious side-effects of each medication. You can get this information from your doctor or pharmacist. Finally, when any new medications are being prescribed, whether by a specialist, an emergency doctor or a physician caring for you in the hospital, you need to ask what they are for and if they could interact with any of the medications you are already taking.
You can trust others to do this for you and hope they don’t make any mistakes, or you can take responsibility and make certain they don’t.
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