We hear it all the time:

•    “I have too many medications and don’t want to carry all of them with me.”
•    “I would need a suitcase to carry them all to the doctor’s office.”
•    “I’ve taken all my meds to another doctor who requested them and they were never looked at.”
•    “You can call my pharmacy or my doctor to get the list; I don’t have time to do all that.”

But there’s a very important reason why we encourage all Freeman patients to bring all their medications, vitamins and supplements – in their original bottles – to all doctor visits. While prescription medications can boost health and even save lives, dangerous interactions can occur when a patient has the wrong mix or doesn’t know off the top of their heads what they regularly take on a daily basis.

Drug interactions can be dangerous, particularly when prepping someone for surgery. Heart, carotid and lung surgeries are just a few procedures that can be affected by drug interactions.

If your healthcare professional isn’t aware of every medication a patient takes, from a supplement to a prescription drug, or if a patient shows up with a medication bottle and it hasn’t been presented, there’s the potential that a heart, carotid or lung surgery could be affected by drug interactions and would need to be canceled or postponed.

The dangers are real – some medications, and even vitamins and supplements, can negatively interact with pain medications, anesthesia or prescribed medications, especially if it has a sedative action. Another interaction could take place post-operation, when some medications and supplements may deplete a patient’s body of certain vitamins, in turn increasing risks of infection. Vitamin K can thicken the blood. Ibuprofen/Naproxen may deplete vitamin C levels. It’s for these reasons, and so many more, that accurate medicine lists – with the exact dosage listed on the bottles – is so important. Depending on the amount, we may need to hold different supplements and different vitamins or medications for different lengths of time for patient safety.

Most if not all hospitals use an electronic health record system, which is essentially an electronic version of a patient’s medical history that is continuously updated. What people don’t understand is that just because many utilize electronic medical records, different hospitals and medical groups use different systems. I personally confer daily with electronic medical records from multiple health systems in our area. Many of these systems don’t “talk” to one another, so when a new patient from another hospital comes to Freeman, we still have to send and receive information and everything has to be recorded into their new Freeman chart by hand. As much as we would love for it to happen, information doesn’t simply flow from one electronic chart to a new one in an organized manner. That’s why an up-to-date medication list and medication bottles are so important.

I encourage every patient to be proactive when it comes to their own care and to make sure every single one of their providers knows what medications they are taking. This is such an easy way to decrease possible medication and treatment errors.