Are you taking the generic drug Clonidine for high blood pressure? Make sure you don’t leave the pharmacy with Klonopin, which is for seizures. Or Colchicine, which is for gout.
Nearly 1,500 commonly used drugs have names so similar to others that they’ve already caused mix-ups, according to a study by U.S. Pharmacopeia, which helps set drug standards.
Rarely does a company change a drug's name after it hits the market. But it has happened twice in recent years. The Alzheimer's drug Reminyl now is named Razadyne, after mix-ups, including two reported deaths, with the old diabetes drug Amaryl. The cholesterol pill Omacor is now named Lovaza, after mix-ups with blood-clotting Amicar.
Doctors' notoriously bad handwriting in writing prescriptions isn't the only culprit. A hurried pharmacist faced with alphabetized bottles on a shelf might grab the wrong one. Nor are computerized prescriptions a panacea. A doctor who e-prescribes still can click the wrong row on the alphabetized screen, picking the epilepsy drug Lamictal instead of the antifungal pill Lamisil.
The problem gets worse as more new drugs are approved each year. But efforts are underway to stem the confusion, and make patients more aware of the risk.
The Food and Drug Administration currently rejects more than a third of proposed names for new drugs because they're too similar to old ones. And the FDA has a pilot program that shifts more responsibility to manufacturers to guard against name confusion. The goal is to spell out how to better test for potential mix-ups before companies seek approval to sell their products.
Even better is a patient-oriented website, a partnership of the nonprofit Institute for Safe Medication Practices and online health service iGuard.org. Go to iGuard.org and enter a drug name – or even a close spelling of it – and you’ll quickly get information on what it looks like, what it’s used for, and even a medication safety check.
