When Drugs Kill! How to Avoid Illness and Death Due to Drug Interactions

With the rise in the number of people taking prescription and over the counter medication, the issue of deadly drug interactions is one that needs to be addressed much more often that it is being addressed now. Many people are taking different drugs for different purposes, and cases have been documented where people are on many drugs at one time, this constitutes an escalating risk for death due to drug interactions and many patients should be made aware of this danger.

Essentially there are three major classes of drug interactions; drug-drug interactions, drug-food interactions and drug - condition reactions. Drug - drug interactions occur when two medicines (or more) interact with each other and cause an unfavorable reaction in the patient. A very good example is people who take cough medicines with antihistamines and then take a sleeping pill with a sedative which causes a slowdown of the metabolic rate to dangerous levels. Drug -food interactions are, like the name suggests, when medication reacts with food to produce ill effects, this occurs many times when alcohol and antibiotics are consumed together. Drug-condition interactions occur when a condition in a person is elevated to harmful effects by the drug, this can occur is a person with very low blood pressure is given blood pressure medication such as garlic.

Drug interactions vary widely depending on the drugs, foods, conditions and most importantly, the patient. The interactions can produce a mild or no effect or can cause death in minutes due to an adverse reaction. This is why it is critical to completely read the full instructions on every single medication that you are taking and not skim over the dosage instructions. The instructions generally inform the patient of any side effects and any combinations which are known to cause ill effects, you can also ask your pharmacist about this information or look it up online.

Many people also take different herbal or natural drugs and vitamins and think that they are better that prescription medications and will not cause and harmful drug interactions, these people are horribly mistaken. In many instances the prescription and synthetic medications go through rigorous testing and approval procedures (as required by the United States Food and Drug Administration or FDA) while many of these natural cures are not tested to the same standard or not tested at all. Many of them have the warning "not tested by the FDA' or 'is not supposed to be used to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease' which should set off a red flag in the patient's mind.

To protect yourself against dangerous drug interactions, all you need to do is speak to a doctor, nurse or health care professional about all the supplements, vitamins and drugs that you currently take when they are prescribing you a new medication. You can also research whenever a new medication is prescribed to ensure that it does not have any dangerous interactions with any drugs that you are on. You should also read all the instructions carefully on every medication that you take to ensure that you do not become another statistic, a death caused by a dangerous drug interaction.

References
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_interaction
2. Eat and Heal - F C & A Medical Publishing