Your Forgotten Medical Updates

One thing I really worry about with the general public is their knowledge of what we need to know about you.

Allergies: In the pharmacy, I SUPER SUPER SUPER need to know if you're allergic to any medications. Please, if you're going to bounce from pharmacy to pharmacy, please retain a list of your allergies and health conditions in your wallet that you can hand to the tech when you register up.

Insurance: Did you change insurances? Did you lose your last card? Is your insurance the type that changes your member number when you get a new card?

Health Conditions: Do you have diabetes, high blood pressure, are you pregnant? If you go to a doctor who is unaware of your allergy or health condition, and he writes a script that may complicate your condition, our computers CAN catch this. That's a reason to only go to one doctor or one pharmacy--don't mix it up with both. Please let at least your pharmacy know about this. Your new cardiologist might not be aware that the medicine she's writing may interact with something you take from your general practicioner. Someone needs to know it all, so they can catch possible dangerous interactions. Ideally, your doctors are aware of what each of them is prescribing you and what sort of conditions you're dealing with (even if it's not in their area of specialty).

The truth is, when you're really sick, you may not take the time to write it all down. And unless you're willing to tote all your recent bottles around with you, it can be hard to remember what all you're putting in your body. Even vitamins can interfere with other medications. Please stick with the same pharmacy. We'll keep track with you.

Bringing Work Home, Pharmacy Style

"My doctor wrote me a prescription for a new drug, and she's starting me off at a HUNDRED AND FIFTY milligrams!! I just...I was looking at it, and it seemed like such a lot for a beginner prescription of Wellbutrin. Is 150 milligrams a lot for Wellbutrin?"

The answer is no. This is an extremely common prescription for Wellbutrin, in fact, I rarely get scripts of any other kind for Wellbutrin, which is useful for a royal gamut of conditions from depression to impulse-control like smoking cessation.

To those who do not receive many maintenence medicines and may be new to prescriptions, take this into account: one adult dose of Allegra (now an Over the Counter medication as of March) is 180 milligrams of fexofenadine. That's just allergy medicine.

I encourage any readers with this question to continue their research of the drug with medical journals and the advice of doctors and pharmacists, and to rest assured--you're normal, the prescription is normal, and it will probably really help you.

That's it for today's Bringing Work Home, where I answer questions I received more than once at work which aren't a terrible idea for me to try to answer. ^_^