Know Your Medication Names - Brand & Generic

Please welcome, guest blogger, Ellen Richter for this post. Know your medication!

If you take a brand-name drug, you should learn all the other names for the drug. I cared for a patient last month who had been taking Plavix for a mini-stroke since 2001. He knew that he should never stop taking the drug, so when he was hospitalized, he asked his nurse what medications his doctor ordered. She told him baby aspirin and clopidogrel. He never heard of clopidogrel so he called his wife & had her bring in his Plavix. He thought the hospital wasn't giving it to him! Every day, he silently took his own Plavix without telling the staff and then was given the daily dose, in generic form, by the nurses! If only he knew the different names for his drugs! He assumed the generic clopidogrel was a new pill the doctor had started him on!

Ellen Richter, RN, CLNC is a legal nurse consultant and founder of South Florida Legal Nurse Consultant Service, specializing in medical record review.
http://www.findlegalnurse.com/index.html