analog

Considering you say "properly prescribed", I question your use of the extreme hyperbole of "murdered" to describe people who lose their lives due to medicines they're taking. To be frank, it's crass and asinine.

The simple truth is, in healthcare today, many people simply do not take any personal accountability for their own medical care. They don't ask any questions that really matter, and are largely in the dark about what they take. When asked if someone has any medical history, a person with a severe heart condition will most often answer, "not really". When I finally get the right info from them, and ask them about medications they take, they generally respond "something for my heart". They don't know if their heart runs too fast, too slow, etc.

Secondary to that is the fact that people see a variety of doctors for their medical care- primary doctors, and specialists- who all prescribe medicines and may have absolutely no idea about the other medicines the person takes. So you have the primary doctor giving some viagra and the cardiologist giving a nitro spray. The combination of the two in any 24 hour period is a recipe for death.

I do give credit to the elderly, though. It seems that the older the patient is, the more "with it" they are with regard to their medical care. They are more often able to state the names of their medications, and know approximately what sort of effects they're used to achieve. In other words, they may tell me they take drug X for high blood pressure, whereas a person younger than them is much more inclined to say "I dunno, I think it's for my heart. Don't know the name of it." I got that guy just a few shifts ago. It turned out to be a blood thinner that doesn't act on his heart, but is used to keep blood in his heart from clotting due to a heart condition he has. So you see, it would be very easy for someone to think, "oh, he has high blood pressure on my monitor, and says he takes something for his heart, I better give him something to slow it down." And then he'd be fucked. Giving him something to slow down his heart with the heart condition he has would nearly (if not actually) kill him.

Know your meds, and know basically what they do. It's not hard to do, and anything short of that is laziness or assuming every medical professional you run into will magically know everything you're on from every single doctor you see. We don't. If people educated themselves a little, most of this issue would be resolved.