Read medicine labels the right way
Confused by medicine labels?
Medication errors cause thousands of deaths every year. Many of them are the result of confusing medicine labels. If you’ve taken a lot of prescription medications or been a caregiver for someone who does, this might not surprise you.
There’s the small print, the acronyms, the hard-to-find warning labels, and the needlessly confusing instructions (“Take two tablets twice a day,” for example). It’s no wonder patients can accidentally take the wrong dose at the wrong time.
And if you're 65 or older, have a chronic illness, live under the poverty line, or speak English as a second language, you may be at a higher risk of medication error.
Prescription label information
One key problem is that drug labels contain so much information that people don’t know where to look. So instead of breaking down each section, they often just don’t read any of it.
The good news is that most medicine labels follow a similar design. If you can get familiar with the basic format, you’re more likely to at least know where to look for instructions and important warnings.
