How To Read Prescription Medication Labels?
Don’t know how to read the prescription medication label? Well, this guide will prove to be very helpful for you in this regard.
The prescription medication label instructs you on how to correctly take the medicine that your healthcare practitioner has prescribed for your treatment plan.
You must comprehend the information on this label well. You will have the best therapeutic results if you take your medicines as directed.
What You Should Know How To Successfully Read A Prescription Medication Label?
Taking drugs as directed by your healthcare professional aids in the recovery and/or management of illnesses. It might be tough to decipher the various components of a prescription label.
Learning how to read a label correctly may help to reduce the chance of unnecessary visits to the office of a provider, hospital readmission, or emergency room.
Prescription Medication Label (Prescription Drug Labels)
In terms of complexity, prescription drug labels are known to be more complex when compared to over-the-counter drugs. According to Consumer Reports, more than half a million American people each year misinterpret this.
The labels from pharmacies are not regulated by the FDA. Depending on the pharmacy, the warning info is placed or printed on the bottle as stickers may differ.
For example, while filling prescriptions specifically for warfarin at distinct pharmacies, the Consumer Reports staffers discover that packaging from Walmart, Costco, CVS, Walgreens, as well as Target involved a diverse number of warnings for similar prescriptions.
Walmart did not include any warnings while filling prescriptions for the first time.
It is also found that labeling can be vague, puzzling, hidden, deceptive, in medical language, or missing entirely.
Many of the difficulties created by irregular prescription labeling might be avoided if prescription labeling were consistent.
Pharmacy Info Sheets
Pharmacists will provide you with a pharmacy info sheet that contains all the drug safety information. One should have a close look at this sheet to understand all the specifications well.
According to Dr. Michael Carome, director of Public Citizen’s Health Research Group, the pharmacy information sheet may not be complete.
As per another statement by Carome, a lot of prescription drugs possess pharmacy info sheets, and those information sheets and the FDA does not review these sheets. And the info may not be as precise as it should be in terms of things to specifically look for.
Consumer Reports discovered “incomplete or difficult-to-read package inserts — and in four out of five cases, a serious omission that violated an FDA requirement” when filling warfarin prescriptions.
Carome suggests looking for official FDA-approved prescribing info on DailyMed, which is a National Institutes of Health-run website or any other drug manufacturer’s website.
Final Verdict
Prescribing information is more difficult to understand than a pharmacy prescription label or information sheet, but it contains more thorough safety information.
In addition, unlike info offered to you by the pharmacy, it has been verified by the FDA for accuracy.
Your pharmacist or doctor might be able to assist you in better understanding key info if you are having problems interpreting prescription information.
