Pharmacists at Mackay Memorial Hospital yesterday said inappropriate use of medication can affect people’s health, so people should read the instructions or consult with a pharmacist before taking medication.
The hospital’s Education Resource Center for Correct Medication Usage, commissioned by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), held more than 50 events — attracting more than 5,000 participants — to raise public awareness on correct medication use before releasing its annual report yesterday.
Hospital superintendent Shih Shou-chuan (施壽全) said that safety is an important issue, as many patients with chronic diseases must take prescription medication every day, but inappropriate use can cause negative health effects.
Photo courtesy of Mackay Memorial Hospital
Chang Ya-hui (張雅惠), section chief of the hospital’s pharmacy department, said that common medication errors include arbitrarily adjusting the dosage or stopping a prescription, recommending or giving their drugs to family or friends, or incorrect storage.
Clinical observations showed that most people view their subjective notions as more important than the instructions of physicians and pharmacists, pharmacy department director Lee Wei-ying (李韋瑩) said, adding that sleeping pills, painkillers and hypotension treatments are among medications people most often take without reading the instructions.
Chang said nearly half of the mistakes involve incorrect dosages, with people aged 60 or above accounting for most errors overall.
She said that a man in his 60s and in the final stages of cancer had reported pain and was prescribed opioid patches, but did not apply the treatment according to prescription — one patch at a time.
He applied three to five patches at a time wherever he felt the pain was, Chang said.
The man was later hospitalized after reporting nausea, vomiting and difficulty breathing, all of which were adverse side effects known to arise from overuse of opioid patches, Chang said.
Lee said another elderly man with hemorrhoids did not remove packaging from an anal suppository before inserting it, leading to bleeding.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater