Yay Pattie! Finally someone actually checks their pills instead of blindly taking them, sometimes for months on end. Can I vote Pattie for an award?

Well, it happens all the time on House, and that's practically a documentary, right?
Also, it happens when Mr. Gower's still in morning over his son's death, too bad George Bailey wasn't there to catch the mistake.

Perhaps this will help the OP to determine what she actually received.

This is a "Pill Identifier" which can ID your pills based on size, shape, color, and the numbers/letters inscribed on the pills.

Hope it helps!

[www.drugs.com]

@MormonChristmas_GitEmSteveDave: And thank you Meg for saying that we are all human and we all make mistakes, and as long as we are informed and just a little vigilant, we can stop a lot of these mistakes from becoming serious.

Seriously folks. If you are taking a med, take the extra minute w/your Dr. and w/your pharmacist to ask questions. At the pharmacist, you have to sign something which usually says "I spoke w/ the pharmacist". Don't sign until you have all of your questions answered and have at least looked over your pills to make sure they are the ones you normally get or match the description on the bottle. Also take the two minutes or so to read the info sheet that comes with the script. It will also give you the description of the pills and what they are used for. If it isn't for your condition, then raise a flag. An extra 5 minutes initially and maybe 2 minutes a month can save your life/save you from being injured. Isn't that time worth it? Same goes for meds for your kids and anyone you know like a parent who might not be the most vigilant. Consider it a mitzvah.

I'm assuming Pattie gets her prescription refilled regularly since she is able to spot them. Pharmacy techs usually fill the prescription while the pharmacist is suppose to check the drug and count.

Someone isn't doing their job correctly, and my bet is the pharmacist.

I always know what the pharmacy gives me because it's packaged with a fold out manual of instructions in three languages, a pouch for the meds themselves and then it's got another slip of paper detailing more instructions.

It all whittles down to: take one once a day.

What kind of Dr says "Increase the dosage" without considering other factors, like a pharmaceutical error or just that the medication isn't working? I've seen tegretol used to control seizures, if the medication isn't working, usually they try a different kind.

I know that it's not an option for a lot of people, but I love my small, hometown pharmacy. They know my whole family by name and actually TALK to you. If your pharmacist didn't seem at all concerned or apologetic, maybe you should consider switching pharmacies.

My daughter was on multiple medications for a while, I'd be furious if they had done this to us. FURIOUS.

doctors scribble, and pharmacists don't have magical bad handwriting deciphering powers

If the pharmacy can't read the script, or even if there's any doubt at all, it's their duty to contact the doctor and confirm the prescription. Failure to do so is negligent.

Hopefully, some of the electronic prescription methods will solve some of the handwriting issues. Last time I had a prescription, my doctor filled out a form and printed it out.

What concerns me in the meantime is, who's to say the pills in the bottle don't actually match the name and description on the label. In the Ramirez example, the bottle probably said the wrong drug, so the description of the pill would have been right.

I am not the paranoid type. When something happens to one person on the other side of the country, I don't start worrying it is an epidemic.

But I think I will check my prescriptions in the future. Can't be hard to look up a drug on the innerweb and see what it looks like and what it's supposed to do.

CVS once gave me the wrong drugs too. It was heart medication for someone with a very similar name.

The pharmacist barely even apologized.

It seems like a lot of these cases are related to drugs that have the same letters/numbers of syllables..as if someone was just going down a chart of alphabetically-listed pills and his finger jumped up or down a line. I know someone who was given Lipitor instead of Lexapro. Kind of a big deal.

Several years ago, after dental implant surgery, I had been prescibed codeine (for pain) and penicillin (for infection). The pharmacist put the wrong pills in the bottles. I ended up taking 4 codeine a day for infection and penicillin as needed for pain.

After I ran out of antibiotics in less than a week, I called my oral surgeon, he figured out what happened. The pharmacist fixed the problem, and there was some involvement with the corporate people b/c it had been a mistake with painkillers.

Scary thing was that I was driving and working while taking this stuff, I'm surprised I didn't accidently cut off a finger at work.

I'm always been a bit paranoid about getting my medicine wrong, and this doesn't help any.

I've actually asked a doctor to rewrite a prescription for me because I couldn't read it. And I always check to make sure everything looks alright before I leave the pharmacy.

I guess it's a good thing to be paranoid about.

Some of the drugstores near me are horribly understaffed. I've used the CVS closest to me (in suburban Philadelphia) for years, but I've noticed that they tend to have about half the number of staff working at any time as other CVS's with pharmacies of equal size. Also, they recently erred by giving me only one months' worth of a drug that I was supposed to get three months' worth of, and there was no way for me to fix it other than by calling my doctor and asking for another prescription. That fumble, plus the insanely lengthy wait times, means I'll be taking my prescriptions to a different CVS.

One thing that can lead to HUGE problems is the prevalence of all these generic meds, particularly because of the multiple different manufacturers.

I picked up a med from my pharmacy one day, and they made a point of telling me that it had changed colors (formerly pink, now blue) due to switching to a different generic brand for the same drug. I'm glad they mentioned it, because several months later I got a bottle of green pills. Since they had made a point of bringing it up earlier (but not this time), I called to confirm this was the right thing and they had, in fact, made an error.

(I love my little mom&pop pharmacy because they care about the little details like this. When I was going to CVS they had such a high volume of business that--although the anonymity factor was nice--this kind of thing would not have been mentioned.)

At least when you're taking something pretty regularly, you know what it's supposed to look like and have something to compare to. It must be so much tougher for short-term things, like antibiotics, to verify you have the right stuff.

My doc now electronically submits prescriptions to the pharmacy. Cuts down on the error margin and means one less trip for me to drop it off.

Something like this happened to my Sister earlier this year. She takes medicine to regulate her Diabetes and fills her bottles regularly at rite aid.

They ended up filli

@MormonChristmas_GitEmSteveDave: What about the elderly? Very sick? Hard of hearing? Of course we need to make sure the medications we are taking are right, but we also need pharmacies to be able to check themselves.

This happened to us...the speaker on the drive through window was so low, the tech inside couldn't hear us and basically just gave my husband some random guy's pills instead of fixing it or making sure of the last name. Luckily we noticed because the pills looked extremely different.

Well, for what it's worth, it's happened to me twice in the last 10 years. Mark you, I'm not on any daily medications either so that's probably not a terribly good sign. In on instance I was given the correct drug in the wrong dosage. In the other, I was actually given a different antibiotic to the one prescribed, specifically I was given a penicillin based drug (to which I was registered with the pharmacy as being allergic.)

I caught both mistakes before taking any, so no harm done per se, but the expressions on the pharmacists faces when I drew their attention to their mistake both times were priceless, a sort of mixture of revulsion and abject terror. I got the distinct impression that they would get into A Lot Of Trouble if I made a stink about it. Both scripts magically became free (a value of ~$450 for one of them) and the apologies flowed free and genuine. I never raised a big stink, though I suppose arguably I should have. I imagine pharmacists are human just like the rest of us. I do know they tend to be very academically gifted and have a fantastic work ethic (they have to be to get accepted into pharmacy programs in the first place)

On a certain level I suspect that a pharmacist/robot hybrid system might be ultimately safer and more efficient. Let a pharmacist enter scripts into the system and then check what the robot dispenses. Let the robot/system also check the holy heck out of it as well. Shouldn't be hard adding a little scanner at the final stage prior to bottling to make sure the pills going in look right and match what the patient should or shouldn't be allowed.

I strongly suspect that's what we're going to see more and more of in the future.

I, for one, don't put up with my doctor scrawling something illegible on a piece of paper and just hope the pharmacist knows sanskrit. I would always ask what it was, and what the dosage instructions are. I later switched doctors and my current doctor puts the prescription in on a computer in the office which prints out an Rx slip with everything nice and legible, then he signs it.

@trrwilson: You didn't notice that you were feeling funny? That's a LOT of pain pills!

This happened to me at the student health center in college. I was supposed to get a bottle of high dose advil and a bottle of penicillin... They filled both with penicillin, didn't put the pharmacists name on the bottle, and also stapled someone else's prescription info to mine as well. Needless to say, that pharmacist didn't last long there. But the higher doses of penicillin from taking twice the dosage cured me faster

Sorry for that..

well they ended up giving her Codine tablets instead of her normal pills. she got very sick and had tons of blood tests and doctor visits to figure out what was wrong with her, she never suspected the script.

She finally took the pills back to the pharmacy and they took them from her, wouldn't give them back to her, made her sign a release and tried to give her a 5 dollar coupon.

needless to say it's in court.

OH NO! SOMEONE, SOMEWHERE, MADE A MISTAKE!

Quick, everyone panic. This is surely an epidemic. In fact, I'm pretty sure that CVS is purposely switching prescriptions to try and kill us all. Someone notify the Attorney General's office. This demands swift government intervention, and heads must roll! I mean, 20/20 reported on an issue sort of like this! Those guys wouldn't sensationalize something just for ratings. It must be a dangerous situation that should gravely concern you...AND YOUR FAMILY!

As an alternate reaction: check your medicines before taking them. Thankfully the 'tipster' was smart enough not to start throwing strange pills down her gullet like they were a new flavor of M&M.

Also, the idea that "chain pharmacies" make an error 20% of the time is definitely not "totally terrifying" to me. What kind of error are you talking about? Does giving me one extra pill count? What about misspelling my name on the label? Take those kind of errors out and I'll revaluate my thoughts on whatever the new statistic is, but until then, I'll just ignore the fear mongering.

Aaaaaannnndddd originally they could only offer me a store credit at first. An email to the president of the university fixed that

@esd2020: My mom told me recently that the best way of avoiding screw ups like this is to use a very specific name...include your middle initials, and make sure you give them your address before you take your meds from the counter. And I always check my meds and my information before I leave. There might be another pecan pi somewhere in the area, and I wouldn't know unless the address and phone number and name were absolutely correct. And of course, I check the medication. Even if it's the meds I take, I don't want to take someone else's prescription.

I had this happen at a local Walgreens two days ago.

First called the Pharmacy and spoke with one of the often rotating personnel. He asked that I return them.

I then logged into the corporate Walgreens web site and using the receipt with an ID coding I logged a complaint. Have not heard back from the corporate dawgs yet.

George

@rkaufman: My mother was given schizophrenia medication once, but she didn't realize for several days because they looked relatively similar to what she was expecting. Things did not go well for her at all. :(

@pecan 3.14159265: Still, some people ignore that. Like Tina, who took the wrong pills for 90 days before realizing she might have the wrong ones: [consumerist.com]

CVS Gave Me The Wrong Pills! Is This Common?

Even conscientious people, people who pay attention to details for a living, people with OCD-esque fussiness about such things, screw up sometimes.

So, yeah, probably.

@MormonChristmas_GitEmSteveDave: The time spent wasting the pharmacist's time is going to cause an increase of errors, not the decrease. The pharmacist will have less time to fill prescriptions.

Also what good is an info sheet if the sheet is for the correct medication and not for the incorrect medication? And it's pretty nuts to be asking a pharmacist to second guess your doctor. If you don't trust your doctor, get a new one.

I used to manage medication for a 9 client group home with each person on a average of 5-9 prescriptions so yeah that's about 80 something different meds per month).

It was not unusual for a prescription to be wrong usually we had 1 every month or so and like others have said taking it back and fixing the problem barely even gets a 'I'm sorry' even in cases where it would have caused a medical emergency if the medication had been administered for any length of time.

However the process of filling prescriptions is a human one and mistakes and it's not unreasonable that the patient (or their caretaker) acts asa final line of protection for themselves.

p.s it happens in hospitals too.

I received someone else's medication entirely from our local Target pharmacy - her name, etc. was on the bottle. I must admit that I didn't read the label before opening the bottle (it was a refill), but I do at least take a good look at the pills themselves and these weren't mine. Instead of my allergy medication I had received high blood pressure medication - I'm thinking that it would have been bad. The pharmacist's reaction was like, aw shucks - she seemed more annoyed than anything. I now go to a different pharmacy. I hope Mary what's her name, whose medication I received, does the same thing.

Post a picture of the pills. The epocrates application for the iPhone has a pill identification tool where you input the physical characteristics of the pill (color, shape, markings) and it will show you the potential matches with photos and descriptions.

@Charlotte Rae's Web: now if the doctors only knew how to actually use the e-script service it would be perfect! i work at a walgreens & you should see what they write on those electronic scripts! if you think reading their hand-writing is bad, try figureing out their e-script program's prefilled directions & what the doctor has added into them. they never make sense & we have to call on 50% of them so they take longer! andthey can take up to 1 hour just to show up in the pharmacies computer system. yes, it cuts down on patients losing scripts, but they take so much longer! and plus they always tell the patients they sent their scripts electronically when in actuality they wait until just before they are going to leave their office to send in all the scripts from the day, so that could be 4 hours or more later! and so we get yelled at for their scrpits not being ready when the doctor hasnt even sent them! yes doctors lie to you when they say they have sent your scripts!

This is why CVS now puts a description of what the medication SHOULD look like on the label.

My parents between them take about 35 pills a day. And it probably happens to one of their prescriptions, on average, every few years.

The important thing is to READ the label, as this wise consumer did, and to do your research. On average, I think pharmacies have a very good track record... but you don't want the 1% (or whatever it is) to hurt you.

@MormonChristmas_GitEmSteveDave: Well actually 2 mistakes happened.

Pattie got the wrong pills, and somebody else got Pattie's pills. So luckily she discovered the error before taking the wrong pills. But did the pharmacy notify the other person that they also got the wrong pills, and not to take them? I'll bet they didn't.

Tegretol XR is to treat seizures, not "mental health problems." Neurological disorders have nothing to do with "mental health." It's crap like this that makes everyone think, even in this day and age, that people with epilepsy have a mental illness.

Anyone can make a mistake and knowing this, I often go to the next pharmacy and ask them what these pills are.

@Canino: Most doctors don't even write Rx anymore as far as I know. Every doctor I go to sends your script right to the printer and it prints out in Arial or a similar typeface.

@nakedscience: There is no way to know if that is a lot of pain pills without knowing the dosage of each pill and the size of the person.

And part of the problem is the asinine made up marketing names the drug companies put on the products. If they put the actual drug name then there might not be as much confusion.

My Dr. was trying to establish the proper dosage of a particular medication, so she prescribed 5mg pills, and the Rx said to take four per day. We would be able to fine-tune the dosage by adding or subtracting one or two pills. The pharmacy chose to give me 20mg pills instead, and changed the instructions on the bottle to take one per day. The Dr. was NOT notified of the change. When 20mg/day didn't have the desired effect, she verbally told me "Take two more pills per day", expecting to up the dose 10mg. I was actually taking 60mg instead of 30mg.

You know all of those scary side effects that are listed on the package insert? They ALL show up when you take double the recommended amount.

While the pharmacy was the primary bad guy here, the event prompted me to have more in-depth discussions of my meds with my Dr. We both communicate better these days, and I'm a LOT more vigilant of what I'm taking.

@nakedscience: Thus why I said a two step process. Your pharmacist is a person. As Meg says, they make mistakes. It happens. Not very often, but no system is foolproof. But the more people who are checking the better. As I have said, after I have taken a med, and know what it looks like, I don't check the insert/description like at first, b/c I then know my meds. If they change, I do take the extra time to quiz people about it.

@Corporate_guy: Your pharmacist can take an extra minute when you are receiving a new prescription and/or changing a med to talk to you w/o the system collapsing. It's their job. I know what all my current meds look like now. So I give the bottle a once over, make sure the ones inside are what I am/have been taking, and then sign my form. If there is a difference/new med, I take the time to ask the Pharm about it and read the literature to make sure there isn't a mistake, and it's the drug my Dr. prescribed(I write down on a little sheet of paper in my pocket the name of what the Dr. is prescribing me, JIC. Only takes a second)
It's very good if the info sheet is for your correct meds, and the ones in the bottle don't match it. It means THERE'S A PROBLEM/ERROR.

@par20pinspot: Extra antibiotics is not always a good thing. [www.merck.com]

Extreme results vary from the need of a colonoscopy bag to death.

Pattie should contact the the Board of Pharmacy in her state and make a report. Pharmacists and their employers may not be required to report errors, but consumers can make reports and should.

The consumers of healthcare are always the last link in the chain. Ask questions. Read the prescription when it's handed to you. If you don't understand the doctor's handwriting, ask that it be rewritten. Open up the prescription bag at the pharmacy counter and check the pills. (Yes, there are probably people standing behind you sighing loudly. Do it anyway.)

@theirishscion: Once in four years for me at my current pharmacy, with two monthly Rxes to fill. They gave me 15 too few of one of my prescriptions because the pharmacy tech filled the wrong-sized bottle and then half-assed it. They fixed it without a problem (I'd anticipated at least some resistance, since "you didn't give me enough pills!" is probably a way common pill-seeking refrain and I didn't even think to check before I went home).

I was at the pharmacy picking up some antibiotics over the weekend (sinus season, ugh) and an older man was profusely thanking the pharmacist for catching a change in his wife's blood pressure medication that had been the result of an error on the doctor's part. The pharmacist alerted them to it and it turned out the dose change might have killed her, and the doctor had just transposed a digit. (Eavesdropping bad, I know, I know.)

This made me feel good about my pharmacy. But this is a small enough town that even though I go to the Walgreens, they at least know me by sight, if not by name.

Well the Walgreens in Colonial Heights Virginia has screwed up my wife's prescriptions several times. They dont even offer an apology, they just grunt and go get the correct pills.

The bad thing is once it was a bery dangerous prescription and the doctor ONLY prescribed 10 (TEN) pills as they were high dosage anti anxiety sleeping pills. Walgreens gave her a full 100+ dose bottle o fun. I read the label that stated 10 and looked in the bottle which was WAY more than 10!

They mixed up her cogentin last summer and we are not sure if they screwed with another generic and after that we are now mail ordering through Anthem. The supplier has been accurate and on time so far.

V