KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Slurred speech. Disorientation. Memory loss. Morris Ganaden thought he was having a stroke.
So did doctors in two emergency rooms, but brain scans and other tests turned up nothing wrong.
Turns out Ganaden, 75, wasn’t having a stroke. He was taking the wrong pills.
Despite efforts to prevent medication errors, mix-ups like this occur across the country with alarming frequency.
Ganaden, of Independence, Mo., was supposed to be taking a common thyroid medication called Synthroid. But a drugstore mistakenly refilled his prescription with Seroquel, a powerful antipsychotic used to treat symptoms of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.
Synthroid tablets are yellow and round. So are the larger Seroquel tablets. Ganaden didn’t detect the difference.
“If it’s in the bottle, you don’t pay too much attention to what it is,” said Ganaden, a retired engineer. “If it was oblong, I probably would have noticed, but it was round and yellow.”
Medication errors — wrong drug, incorrect dose or improper use — harm at least 1.5 million people every year, according to the Institute of Medicine. Confusion caused by drugs with similar names accounts for up to 25 percent of the reported errors.
Heartburn drug Zantac gets mixed up with antihistamine Zyrtec. Prostate drug Flomax gets confused with asthma drug Volmax.
Health care organizations and federal regulators are working to prevent these kinds of mistakes, but the job is daunting.
In a 2008 report, U.S. Pharmacopeia, the organization that sets standards for drugs, found 1,470 drugs implicated in medication errors, some lethal, caused by brand names or generic names that sounded or looked alike.
Together, these drugs created more than 3,000 mixed-up pairs, nearly twice the number the organization counted in 2004. Many initiatives aim to reduce medication errors, but their effects are hard to gauge.
