Medical Dangers : Bizarre Prescriptions.

January 5, 2006

It is always better to get a second opinion. It is also not a good practice to gulp down medicines for the least discomfort. Often simple rest and a change in diet is best. Even doctors say that common viral infections take seven days to cure if left alone and a week if given antibiotics. Regards, Jagannath. Issue Wednesday, January 04, 2006 http://www.telegraphindia.com/archives/archive.html Doctors’ prescription or ‘jungle of errors’ G.S. MUDUR New Delhi, Jan. 3: Bizarre prescriptions don’t surprise Usha Gupta any more. She’s seen a child prescribed four times the daily dose of iron, a middle-aged person asked to take a meaningless combination of medication for blood pressure and a patient with common cold treated with antibiotics, an anti-diarrhoeal and a laxative. “Sometimes, it seems to me, I’m looking at a jungle of errors,” said Gupta, the head of pharmacology at Maulana Azad Medical College in New Delhi who has spent years

tracking the irrational prescriptions doctors write for their patients. She’s seen prescriptions with a wrong choice or dose of drug or wrong duration of treatment. Steps to stop irrational prescriptions would have to come from within the medical community, Gupta said yesterday at a national workshop on rational use of drugs. The move by medics to campaign against irrational prescriptions appears to be gaining momentum. Gupta herself is part of an effort by the Delhi Society for Promotion of Rational Use of Drugs to get government doctors to prescribe the correct medicines to all patients at state-run hospitals in Delhi. Jaslok Hospital in Mumbai has just launched what it calls a Rational Therapeutics Initiative, a plan to provide patients quality drugs at competitive prices. A panel of experts will draw up

standard therapy guidelines — a set of rules to guide doctors when they write a prescription — to be followed by all doctors at the hospital. “We’re starting now, and we’re conscious that it isn’t going to be easy,” says paediatrician Raj Anand, Jaslok’s medical director. While drawing up standard guidelines for treatment, the panel might find itself working against the interest of pharmaceutical companies that are promoting expensive drugs even when alternative medicines equally effective are available. Rajasthan has also launched a campaign against irrational prescriptions. Workshop delegate and Jaipur-based ophthalmologist Om Prakash Sharma is among specialists in the state training local doctors the science of rational prescriptions. India’s medical community discovered the dangerous consequences of irrational prescriptions nearly two decades ago when studies revealed that

the typhoid bacteria circulating in India had become resistant to a large number of antibiotics abused by doctors. Researchers believe drug-resistant cholera and malaria have also become more common through inappropriate use of drugs. Scientists are now worried that irrational drug use by HIV-positive people might lead to drug-resistant HIV. A report released by the National Commission on Macroeconomics and Health last year had warned that 10 out of the top 25 drugs sold in India are nonessential or irrational or hazardous. “A lot of money is spent on unnecessary medications,” said Ranjit Roy Chaudhury, a member of the commission. Drug experts warn that the number of irrational combination of drugs has increased in recent years. “Five years ago, it was less than 25. We now have more than 80,” said Chandra Gulhati, editor of MIMS India, a monthly drugs journal. “India’s drug industry has had dramatic successes,”Gulhati said. Ninety-eight per cent of drugs used in India are manufactured locally, drugs worth $2 billion are exported to over 90 countries, and drug prices in India are among the lowest in the world. “But this continued irrational use of drugs is deplorable.” “New opinions often appear first as jokes and fancies, then as blasphemies and treason, then as questions open to discussion, and finally as established truths.” – George Bernard Shaw.

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