Free med info

According to the National Association of Chain Drug Stores, of those who use prescription medicine, 30 to 50 percent do not use them as directed. Deciphering information from medicine advertisements and labels can be an unruly task. If misunderstood or misinterpreted, one's health and possibly life can be threatened.

If doctors do not adequately cater to a patient's concerns or information given by pharmacists is incomplete, the World Wide Web has an abundance of sites which serve as an online pharmacist, allowing the patient to come to his or her own conclusions.

One site, accessable at www.rxlist.com, has compiled information on more than 5,000 drugs. The site lists facts from the drugs' package inserts without attempting to intrepret or explain the drugs' different monographs.

In this day, the overmedicated patient should not be so trusting of hasty perscriptions written by overworked doctors. To avoid harmful repercussions that can stem from crossing drugs, patients need to take the initiave to educate themselves instead of trusting the job to pharmacists and doctors.

As free information on how to read a prescription label, drug description, contraindications, dosage and side effects become more readily available, patients should take advantage of such invaluable information.