Woman with dry eye accidentally prescribed erectile dysfunction cream
By Alexandra Klausner
January 9, 2019 | 10:39am | Updated
MORE ON: PRESCRIPTION DRUGS 2019 begins with higher prescription drug prices Cigna seals $54B acquisition of Express Scripts Doctor linked to Thousand Oaks shooter arrested for pushing pills Ex-janitor charged with posing as a doctor, doling out medicine
That pharmacist might want to get his or her vision checked.
A pharmacist in Glasgow, Scotland, misread a woman’s prescription for VitA-POS, a lubricant for severe dry eye and corneal erosions, as Vitaros, a cream for erectile dysfunction, according to a case study published last month in BMJ Journals. Neither the woman nor the pharmacist is being publicly identified.
As a result of the mix-up, the dry eye patient suffered chemical injuries including blurred vision, a swollen eyelid and redness, the BBC reported. After doctors treated her with antibiotics, steroids and lubricant, she recovered within a few days, although she continues to suffer from corneal erosions.
Prescription errors like this could be prevented in the future if doctors use capital letters and hyphens for meds like VitA-POS instead of lowercase letters, Dr. Magdalena Edington, from Glasgow’s Tennent Institute of Ophthalmology, wrote in the BMJ report.
She said that similar medication names have led to prescribing errors in the past, but that this case was particularly flawed.
“It is unusual in this case that no individual, including the patient, general practitioner or dispensing pharmacist, questioned erectile dysfunction cream being prescribed to a female patient, with ocular application instructions,” Edington wrote in the study. Los Angeles'
=========================================
Did she end up cock-eyed?
