Who does your pharmacist report to? Turns out: Nobody
Call me crazy, but I always thought I could trust my pharmacist to grab the right pills off the shelf while filling my prescription. But it turns out to be another situation in which you just have to look out for Number One. Have some prescription medications in your bathroom? Go check out the labels. You might not have noticed before, but there should be a description of what the pills should look like. Now, open the bottle—and count yourself lucky if the pills actually match the description! Yes, this is what it's come to. What, you thought you could walk up to the counter, hand the pharmacist a little slip of paper, and get a bottle of the exact medication you came for? Well…think again. Recently, a reader of the consumer-advocacy blog The Consumerist wrote in to tell of a disturbing experience at her local CVS. Pattie's pills were supposed to be large blue ovals. What she got instead was a handful of little round gold pills. Luckily, she'd been taking her prescribed medication for a couple of years, so she knew exactly what the pills were supposed to look like. But what if she had been getting the prescription filled for the first time? When Pattie got back to the CVS, the pharmacist was apologetic but didn't seem too concerned. Pretty scary, right? It gets scarier. Because we might never know how often this happens. Pharmacies actually AREN'T REQUIRED to report errors to any regulating agency. But a 20/20 investigation found that chain pharmacies made some type of error in more than one in five cases. Of course, Pattie had never thought to check the label for a description of the pills before. But you can bet she'll be checking it every time from now on. Source:
"CVS Gave Me The Wrong Pills! Is This Common?" The Consumerist (www.consumerist.com), 4/6/09. | 
