Medication safety comes from
understanding and managing your risks
of drug interactions and side effects
Interactions
A "drug interaction" is a chemical or biological effect caused by a drug interacting with another drug, a drug interacting with a herb or a drug interacting with a medical condition. Interactions frequently create side effect symptoms.
Interaction checkers only check for pairs of drugs which are believed to cause problems when they interact chemically. This is the check your pharmacist or doctor likely makes for you. Unfortunately, interactions are not the only common cause of problems. Heath Ledger died of his combination of drugs but did not have any drug-drug interactions.
Side Effects and Combined Risk
Unlike Interactions, Side Effects can be caused by individual medications. However, when several of your medications pose a specific side effect risk, for example, nausea, your risk of nausea is typically higher than if you were only taking one of these medications (clinical professionals call this "additive toxicity").
Think of it this way - if you are on one medication that causes nausea in 1 out of every 10 people you might be 1 of the 9 who does not get nausea. But if you are on five medications which pose a risk of nausea, you could end up with a combined risk from these five medications that causes nausea in 5 out of every 10 people. You are now much more likely to experience nausea.
The combined side effects in Heath Ledger's drugs caused him to stop breathing and therefore to die. It is possible that his doctors were treating his breathing difficulties but did not understand that they may have been from his medications to start with.
Conditions
Side effects often look just like any other medical condition and it is challenging to tell if someone has a new condition or if they are experiencing a side effect. Side effects can range from nausea to heart attacks to liver failure.
If a side effect is causing heart palpitations you may end up being prescribed an additional medication to treat the heart palpitations when it may have been better to change the original medication that was causing the palpitations. Clinical professionals call situations like this a "prescribing cascade".
It is important that you help your doctor determine if your symptoms are a result of your medications before assuming that they are a new condition. This is why you must ask the First Question First. "Could my symptoms be caused by my medications?"
Answer the First Question First with SURVEYOR Health
SURVEYOR Health's Medication Risk Maps let you answer this question in minutes, for free, before spending time and money improperly diagnosing and treating a side effect as if it were a primary condition.
Click here to get started finding out more about the medications your family is taking.