Drug Safety Online Resources ( Bottom Line newsletter)

JLH · Post by **JLH** » Fri Feb 20, 2009 10:08 am

Drug Safety Online Resources

Robert N. Butler, MD
Mount Sinai School of Medicine

ake advantage of these free resources available through the Internet. General information...
Food and Drug Administration at www.fda.gov/cder/consumerinfo/druginteractions.htm. Explanations of drug interactions.
The Joint Commission at www.jointcommission.org. Brochure about preventing medication mistakes, includes a card listing your meds to fill in and carry in your wallet. Click on "Speak Up" in the "Patient Safety" tab.

Checking interactions: Only your doctor or pharmacist can give you the whole story about your medications. To get started, though, you can look up potential drug interactions online with drug interaction checkers from...
DrugDigest at www.drugdigest.org.
Medscape at www.medscape.com/druginfo/druginterchecker. Registration (free) is required to use the drug interaction checker.
Discovery Health Channel at http://health.discovery.com/webapps/dru ... spLetter=A.
Merck Manual at www.merck.com/mmhe/sec02/ch019/ch019a.html. Interactive chart of interactions between herbal supplements and prescription and nonprescription drugs.
Pills through the Web: If you order medications online for convenience or to save money, bypass sites that (illegally) waive prescriptions for prescription-only medicines. Sites posting the Verified Internet Pharmacy Practice Sites (VIPPS) symbol have been approved by the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy.

G'ma Mary · Post by **G'ma Mary** » Fri Feb 20, 2009 5:47 pm

Thanks, Joan. I haven't taken time to look at any of these sites, but they do look good. I saved it to my "medical info" file!

G'ma Mary

Post by **tex** » Fri Feb 20, 2009 7:05 pm

Hmmmmmm. Merck seems to have removed the page with the chart of interactions between herbal supplements and drugs. I wonder if they were afraid that information might be too useful to allow mere patients to view it.

Tex

JLH · Post by **JLH** » Fri Feb 20, 2009 7:34 pm

http://www.merck.com/mmhe/sec02/ch019/ch019a.html

There is more info if you click each page at the lower bottom right where it says next and the word is in red.

Post by **tex** » Fri Feb 20, 2009 7:50 pm

Thanks,

I kept getting an error page from the original link, for some reason or other.

Tex

JLH · Post by **JLH** » Fri Feb 20, 2009 8:27 pm

I did, too.

Dee · Post by **Dee** » Sat Feb 21, 2009 9:49 am

I have used Drug Digest and Medscape for a long time.
Good references.

Dee~~~~

Post by **tex** » Sat Feb 21, 2009 10:21 am

Hmmmmmmmmm. When I try to load drugdigest.org, my browser, (Firefox 3), won't load it. I get a "Secure Connection Failed" error, due to this:

www.drugdigest.org. uses an invalid security certificate.

Are y'all using IE? If so, doesn't it object to loading it? Of course, it could just be a temporary server problem.

Tex