Islamabad: In Pakistan, doctors wrote a prescription that does not fulfill the requirements of international medical standards. The doctor prescribed excessive and expensive medications to patients, as doctors are often illegible, missing instructions on dosage, and list of large number of expensive branded drugs.
A recent study published in the Pakistan Journal of Medical Sciences reviewed 1,100 prescriptions in Peshawar. The study revealed that 59 per cent of the prescriptions were barely legible, and many others offered incomplete directions about dosage and use. More importantly, certain expensive drugs were over-prescribed even when generic cheaper versions were available in the market.
Assistant Professor Dr. Osman Ahmed Raza told foreign media that some medical stores can be counted in the fingers where doctor’s fault can be catch easily because there are qualified pharmacists who can detect the doctor’s fault. Pakistani doctors tend to prescribe 3 to 30 medicines per time, GP prescribed drugs were 90% more expensive branded drugs despite the poverty in Pakistan.
The other main distress was about the common dispensing of painkillers that were listed on almost 62 per cent of the prescriptions. Even when prescriptions are legible, there is still no guarantee for the patient to get the right medicine in Pakistan where fake drugs are ubiquitous.
Over three billions prescriptions are written in the United States every year. Unreadable handwriting, indistinct abbreviations and dosage instructions are the reasons behind mistakes that prove incurable for thousands of patients. But more notably, all prescriptions included only branded, and hence more expensive, drugs rather than the cheaper generic drugs.