spacer The doctor in the emergency room said, "If you are exposed to sulfa just one more time, you will die." Today, Jessica wears a medic alert bracelet.

Research confirms that doctors often downplay the risks of side effects. For example, doctors at the Mayo Clinic did a study of people who were prescribed new drugs to take when they went home from the hospital. Only 11 percent said that they had been warned about possible side effects.

Once patients have started taking a drug, that picture doesn't change much. Researchers at the University of California at San Diego found that doctors routinely brush off patients' complaints of side effects. Perhaps that's one reason why up to 19 million people land in the emergency room each year, as Jessica did, as a result of problems with the medicines they take.

Side effects of medicines result in more than 300,000 deaths each year in the U.S. This number includes 106,000 patients in hospitals, according to research reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

February 27, 2011

Side effects of medications can be deadly

by Elizabeth L. Bewley

Jessica's doctor wanted to prescribe a sulfa drug in a cream for her to put on her skin. She reminded him that she was severely allergic to sulfa.

He said, "Oh, it won't hurt you; it's just going on your skin."

She said, "I don't want any drug with sulfa in it."

Eventually, he agreed to write a prescription for a drug without sulfa. When Jessica got to the drugstore, she double-checked with the pharmacist. He assured her that the cream did not have any sulfa in it.

Jessica rubbed it into her skin and went to her job in a delicatessen. She started cutting meat. On a downward stroke of the meat cleaver, she passed out, chopped off all the fingernails on one hand, and collapsed in a heap on the floor.

It turns out that the doctor had decided to get around her refusal to take sulfa by pretending to change the prescription. He even called the pharmacist and told him to tell Jessica that the drug didn't have any sulfa in it if she asked. Jessica passed out as a result of being given a drug to which she had a known allergy.