The fine print

If you are like me, you have more than one occasion to go to a pharmacy for medicines. In recent days, I find that the fine print on the medicines is more scary than the disease you may be suffering from!

In India, though the problem is that you cannot read the fine print. Most of the pills come pressure packed in silver packages that are not only difficult to cut open but almost impossible to read. If you are lucky, you can decipher the name of the medicine and that of the manufacturer. Beyond that you need a powerful microscope to find out the composition of the pill-- even if it is there-- or any instructions on how to use them. The neighborhood pharmacist can help to a limited extent and perhaps your doctor who prescribed this in a completely undecipherable scrawl can unscramble his order. For the rest, you are generally on your own and are often reduced to asking friends about what to do.

In the US, the problem is the reverse. Every medicine here has a four page enclosure accompanying it of which half gives instructions and the other is dictated by a lawyer to prevent potential lawsuits. These enclosures are, however, guaranteed to frighten you into even more visits to the doctors if not dissuading you from even taking the medicine. Let me quote from one such actual enclosure "Side effects: Dizziness, lightheartedness, headache, blurred vision, loss of appetite, stomach upset, diarrhea, or constipation...This medication may lead to excessive loss of body water and minerals..Tell your doctor immediately if the following side effects occur...numbness/tingling of arms/legs, ringing in the ears, hearing loss." One would imagine that the medicine in question would be some serious earthshaking concoction. But no these warnings are for a very common drug- furosemide or lassix ! Besides giving this warning on possible side effects, this goes onto detail precautions, drug interactions and what to do if you overdose. Reading these enclosures is enough to cause a heart attack or at the very least a constant run to the doctor at the sign of the least of these symptoms.

Faced with this divergent approaches, what is a patient to do? In the day of the internet, there is emerging a new solution. You can consult a web doctor on line or go to one of the many user forums. The user forums are a relatively new development where patients from around the world post their experience of using different medicines and discuss with each other the impacts of different dosages and alternative medicines. While this is not recommended as a solution or an alternative to consulting a full fledged doctor, it does substitute for word of mouth advise that most indulge in and it does provide access to detailed information on most medicines and their results. At the very least, consult these pages before you go to the doctor so that you are an informed patient rather than one sitting before a high priest or oracle and blindly obeying their prescriptions!