Safe, Or Save

Think of telephone keypad, and for both push-button and touch screen cell phone users, what come to mind is the standardized grid layout.

Imagine a scene when the telephone factory is running out of certain numerical keys, leaving the manufacturers no choice but putting whatever numerical keys available to fill up the keypad. With such undecipherable keypads, someone could still make use of memory (not many of us) to dial the right number. And I will not say I hate and smash such messy telephones but I will not say I won't.

Yes, dialing the wrong number isn't that bad to be howled about. What if the mix-ups aren't about the telephone keypads but the medicine?

That happened within the government hospitals. Those drugs we gave out to the patients look exactly like the random number telephone keypads. I think no one really knows what a drug looks like because, these days, its appearance keep changing with every new generic drug introduced by the public hospitals. That's why my kidney disease patient (that is, having drug treatment for many many years) could still be confused by the new appearance of pills and took double the amount of blood pressure pills.

Never mind what your hospital managers told you about the top issue of medication safety. They have a higher priority - if money is an issue, they will put anything else behind. There is not a hospital manager who isn't constrained by drug expenditure. The hard truth is, all hospitals go on at length cutting the drug budget, say, by comparing the price of generic drugs. Although brand-name drugs and generic drugs are supposingly interchangeable (another worst-kept tooth-fairy myth), they can differ substantially in their appearance. I'm not saying that generic drugs aren't cost-effective substitutes for brand-name medications. No, the question is not to judge if generic drug and brand-name drug are identical and, of course they never are, we have to accept taking generic drugs. But it seems that we're changing the generic drugs too frequently and totally out of our control.

Of course, we should not complain about things totally out of our control, such as the weather. As for the generic drug change, we seem to change them even more often than the weather change.