The Center for Disease Control (CDC) estimates that 82% of Americans take prescription medications and that almost 30% take five or more prescription medications. With all those prescription drugs, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) reports that 1.3 million Americans are injured every year from errors in their prescription or errors in the medication.
Pharmaceutical malpractice is when a pharmacist incorrectly fills a prescription or incorrectly mixes the drugs, resulting in wrong dosages and drugs that can actually harm medication-takers because of using the wrong compounds or ones that the patient is allergic to. Furthermore, pharmacists and drug companies also commit pharmaceutical malpractice when they fail to provide proper instructions for taking the medication, mislabel the medications, or fail to adequately and honestly test the drug before producing and selling the drugs for public use.
One example of such malpractice from a large-scale pharmaceutical company that was headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri was KV Pharmaceuticals. KV Pharmaceuticals was mislabeling and improperly manufacturing prescription pain killers. The company produced pain killers that were much lower in dosage than what they labeled it as, and also produced pain killers that were much higher than what was labeled. Both scenarios could lead to significant injury to those taking the drugs, such as continued pain and anguish, as well as severe reactions, injuries, and even death from taking too high of a dose. In fact, one morphine shipment was over twice the strength of the labeled product.
Furthermore, malpractice can occur when drugs are not adequately tested in clinical studies. This can occur because of improper procedures, carelessness in rushing a drug through the study, or hiding negative test results. In today’s market, there is increased pressures on pharmaceutical companies to get drugs on the market that cure ailments or diseases. Given the lucrative nature of the business, companies want to be the first to have a certain drug on the market. Those companies then charge consumers high prices for their drugs. However, in this rushed process to make pharmaceutical products that make the company large amounts of money, there is a huge incentive to hide adverse effects in studies or rush the study overall before adverse events become apparent.
Placing a drug on the market or improperly filling a prescription that injures a consumer is pharmaceutical malpractice. It is important to hold companies and pharmacists accountable. A study done by a Boston hospital found that over 1 in 27 prescriptions filled contained errors. Of those errors, almost 1 in 4 was not caught by verification processes. The errors that were not caught were found to have a 23.5% chance of adverse reaction, a high number of those were found to be serious adverse reactions to the errors.
With the prevalence of prescription drugs in America today, we run an increased risk of being harmed by such drugs if they are not properly manufactured, labeled, mixed, or instructions on their use are not given. Those harmed should not have to suffer without help when the companies and pharmacists, who produced and gave those people the drugs that injured them, reap all the benefits of the lucrative drug business.