People usually expect their doctor to behave as an expert should. Unfortunately, an unqualified belief that a doctor is both knowledgeable about the treatment they recommend and a patient's history could lead to someone suffering a preventable medical emergency. All...
Anesthesia, which is medication that reduces someone's awareness and sense of pain during surgery, is one of the most impressive aspects of modern medicine. Anesthesiologists are medical doctors who go to school for years to learn how to safely administer these drugs...
How many bottles of prescriptions are in your medicine cabinet? Although “overprescribing” is often brought up in the context of opioids alone, the reality is that too much of any medication can be a bad thing. The overprescribing of medications has emerged as a...
Anesthesia is a modern marvel. Local anesthesia can numb a specific area, whereas general anesthesia can put someone completely under so that they are unconscious. Anesthesia is also used during major surgery and it makes it possible to perform types of surgery that...
Physicians are the gatekeepers for many forms of medical treatment, including prescription drugs. If a patient thinks that they might benefit from a trendy new medication that helps people lose weight or keep their blood pressure under control, they will have to...
Some prescription medication errors occur in a patient's home and are therefore not the fault of any medical professional. The patient or their caregiver misremembers the doctor's instructions or mixes up several medications with poor results. However, medication...
Medical providers aren’t immune to making mistakes. Unfortunately, those mistakes can quickly put a person’s life in danger or cause them serious injuries. Making a mistake on the dosage of a medication, providing too much of the medication or even prescribing the...
Medical mistakes happen all the time in the hospital, and quite a few of them involve prescription medications. Both the pills that staff members hand out throughout the day and the medications administered intravenously in liquid form can do more harm than good if...
When patients receive a prescription for specific medications, they typically get that prescription from a medical provider, like a doctor or surgeon. That prescription is ordered at a local pharmacy. The technician in the pharmacy may put together the order, and the...
Medication errors happen far too often in the United States. According to the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), as many as 9,000 people in this country die every year due to medication errors and hundreds of thousands more suffer lesser injuries....