My goodness. I think somebody over at Home on the Strange might have encountered one of those people who makes life so hard for those of us who really have invisible disabilities! Go on over and read the comic. I don’t want to spoil the surprise!

Well, Time Magazine reports that the National Academies of Science’s Institute of Medicine says that’s the figure, anyway.

Doctors’ sloppy handwriting kills more than 7,000 people annually. It’s a shocking statistic, and, according to a July 2006 report from the National Academies of Science’s Institute of Medicine (IOM), preventable medication mistakes also injure more than 1.5 million Americans annually. Many such errors result from unclear abbreviations and dosage indications and illegible writing on some of the 3.2 billion prescriptions written in the U.S. every year.

The cure, according to the sources cited in the article, is automated prescribing. Physicians would use a web-enabled phone to select medications and dosages from menus, so names and numbers wouldn’t be miswritten or misheard (mis-selected is always possible, but you can’t removed all possibility of error). Most of the money for the systems will come from health insurers, so I don’t know how all this will work for people who pay for their own prescriptions.

The whole article left me with many questions, in fact, about choice, and product positioning - will doctors even be able to prescribe medications that aren’t in the “formulary” when they know that something else will work better? Will they be able to select something outside the standard range of doses? What about compounded prescriptions?

This little statistic surprised me, but there’s no source cited, so I’m not sure I trust it.

SureScripts CEO Kevin Hutchinson says one key to reducing medication errors is to get the most prolific prescribers to transition to electronic processing. “Not a lot of people understand that 15% of physicians in the U.S. write 50% of the prescription volume,” Hutchinson says. “And 30% of them write 80%. So it’s not about getting 100% of physicians to e-prescribe. It’s about getting those key 30% who prescribe the most. Then you’ve automated the process.”

Unfortunately, Time doesn’t bother to give any suggestions as to how to save lives until this utopian system to control those wild and wooly scribblers is in place. I guess I’ll have to give it a go.

Please remember that when I say “you,” I mean you or your advocate.

First, be sure that you always know what your doctor is prescribing for you, and why. Take notes. Write down both the name and the dosage of every medication, and what it’s for. If you’re unclear on the spelling, as the doctor or his staff to spell it out or write it down for you.

If your doctor is giving you refills on your normal medications, look at the refill prescriptions. Do they seem to say what you expect them to say? If not, ask about them. Be sure. He might have misremembered or written down the wrong thing. Doctors are not infallible. It has happened to me! If you’ve already left the office, contact his staff. It’s better to be safe than sorry!

Compare your notes to the prescription bottle before you leave the pharmacy. If the prescription has been filled with a generic and your doctor gave you a brand name, double check with the pharmacist (not just a clerk) to be sure that they really are the same medication. If your doctor said you were to take the medication twice a day and you’ve only got 30 pills to last 60 days, don’t leave the pharmacy.

Read the information included with your prescription. Make sure that it agrees with whatever the doctor told you, or makes sense considering why the doctor prescribed this medication for you. If you don’t understand, again, call the doctor’s office, or at least the pharmacy. “I have fibromyalgia, and my doctor prescribed this medication, but the insert just talks about depression. Why?” It’s a perfectly valid question. If the doctor already explained that to your satisfaction, of course, you needn’t call — but do call if anything doesn’t make sense.

Taking these precautions should protect you, whether your doctor scribbles, has beautiful penmanship, or uses an automated system.

I responded to a post in a friend’s LiveJournal, in which she talked about a friend of hers who has just been diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome. Her friend was very upset that my friend didn’t believe there is a cure for fibromyalgia or CFS (at least, there isn’t one right now). This is part of my response.

I think that the fact that there’s finally acknowledgment from the CDC and the like that CFS is real, and research proving that FMS is real and showing a genetic link, is very promising. That greatly increasing the probability of research being done that might find a cure, or at least decent treatments.

But no, I don’t really look for a “cure” for either disease. I think the best we’re going to see for some time is better treatments for the symptoms. I’m fairly certain that both diseases will be found to be genetic weaknesses triggered by environmental conditions that damage the nervous and/or immune systems. Gene therapy may be able to repair some of that damage. Maybe. Germline therapy might offer our descendants the possibility of not passing the genetic weaknesses on to their children.

But - not expecting a cure doesn’t mean that I don’t pay attention to the research and the latest information available about treatments.

I think hoping for a cure, in some ways, can be a way of trying to shift responsibility for how we proceed to the medical establishment. If there isn’t one coming, the only improvement we’re going to experience is what we manage with what’s available now. The improvements we make in how we eat, move, sleep, interact, etc. are up to us, and they can make a huge difference. We can get some relief from currently available medications by working with our doctors. We can use various techniques to improve our cognitive functioning or prop ourselves up despite fibro fog. And if we aren’t sitting around waiting for somebody else to hand us a cure, we’re more likely to do those things.

“We are able to laugh when we achieve detachment, if only for a moment.”
 — May Sarton

I do at least a dozen silly things every day, thanks in part to fibro fog. The sooner I let go of my anger and frustration and laugh at myself, the sooner my stress levels go back down, allowing me to think more clearly again.

Not that it’s news to those of us who have it, but it’s good to be validated!

Fibromyalgia often has been misdiagnosed as arthritis or even a psychological issue. Increasingly, though, the scientific knowledge about fibromyalgia is growing, and a new paper from the University of Michigan Health System says there are “overwhelming data” that the condition is real, is characterized by a lower pain threshold and is associated with genetic factors that can make some people more likely to develop fibromyalgia. …

“It is time for us to move past the rhetoric about whether these conditions are real, and take these patients seriously as we endeavor to learn more about the causes and most effective treatments for these disorders,” says Richard E. Harris, Ph.D., research investigator in the Division of Rheumatology at the U-M Medical School’s Department of Internal Medicine and a researcher at the U-M Health System’s Chronic Pain and Fatigue Research Center.

The name of one of the authors of the paper, Dr. Daniel J. Clauw, will be familiar to many of you from other studies on fibromyalgia. He says that, “In people without pain, these structures encode pain sensations normally. In people with fibromyalgia, the neural activity increased. These studies indicate that fibromyalgia patients have abnormalities within their central brain structures.”

ScienceDaily: Pain From Fibromyalgia Is Real, Researchers Say