Medication Mistake

A Delaware jury has awarded a family $1.6 million in a medical malpractice case in which the wrong prescription medicine was allegedly prescribed by a doctor. In this particular case, the woman was given too much of a heart medication for her kidneys to handle. Since she was on dialysis, her body couldn’t process the amount of the drug that they gave her and she died.

These days, with more and more prescription drugs on the market, it is all to easy for doctors to make a mistake and prescribe the wrong medicine, or the wrong dose. Sometimes a doctor’s handwriting is so bad that the pharmacy can’t read the writing, and the pharmacy doesn’t call the doctor to clarify the handwriting, leading to serious and sometimes fatal prescription / medication errors.