Archive for December, 2008

Self-Dosing Pain Medications - be careful!

Allowing patients to control their own pain medication intravenously is four times more likely to cause the patient harm than other medications, a new study says.
The report, published in the December issue of The Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety, shows that most mistakes involving intravenous patient-controlled analgesia (PCA) resulted from either [...]

Serevent and Foradil asthma drugs may be risky

The risks of two widely used asthma drugs outweigh their benefits for both children and adults, a U.S. Food and Drug Administration advisory panel said Thursday.
The health panel targeted GlaxoSmithKline’s Serevent and Foradil, made jointly by Novartis AG and Schering-Plough, for restrictions, but it excluded Advair, Glaxo’s biggest-selling drug in the class of medications known [...]