You say tomato, I say tomahto.

[Guest guest]

Hi Everyone,

Every now and then I post something from my own forum that I think

would be of interest for this warm and fuzzy forum.

Joe Medina, CPhT

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You say tomato, I say tomahto.

Which is all well and good as long as we're talking about fruits and

vegetables -- but not so good if the nurse says " fentanyl " and the

hospital pharmacist hears " sufentanil, " as happened to one patient

preparing for an endoscopy.

The patient, given an opioid about 10 times more potent than the one

prescribed, ended up in cardiopulmonary resuscitation.

The problem of sound-alike/look-alike drug names and its close cousin

-- plain old mispronunciation -- abounds. The dilemma would almost be

comical, except that people can die.

" [Mispronunciation] is more than a challenge, it's also a danger, "

said Stanberry, assistant professor of pharmacy practice at

Texas A & M Health Science Center Irma Lerma Rangel College of Pharmacy.

" If you pronounce it wrong, you may end up with the wrong drug, " added

Marilyn Storch, coordinator for all patient safety projects and the

health care quality and information department at U.S. Pharmacopeia

(USP), the official " standards-setting " authority for medications,

dietary supplements and other health-care products sold in the United

States.

And more words -- and syllables -- are entering the drug world all the

time.

" As drugs proliferate, they start to sound alike, like Celexa and

Celebrex, " said Dr. Kennedy, director of geriatric psychiatry at

Montefiore Medical Center in New York City. " It's just going to get

worse with increases in the number of drugs and in the number of

unfamiliar names. "

Also, bear in mind that for countless physicians, many medications

that they were trained to pronounce and prescribe when they were in

medical school are no longer used, Kennedy added.

The Celexa/Celebrex combination is a classic example, but there are

others. Losec, for heartburn, was confused so often with Lasix, a

diuretic, that the name was changed to Prilosec. But now that gets

confused with Prozac, according to a USP report.

And the Alzheimer's drug Reminyl was changed to Razadyne after mix-ups

involving Amaryl, which lowers blood sugar. The mix-ups reportedly

resulted in two deaths.

And what about names that are just too long? The generic name for

Flurizan, an investigational Alzheimer's drug, is tarenflurbil. " It's

almost too many syllables to pronounce, " Kennedy said. Does anyone

know how to pronounce bapineuzumab, another investigational drug for

Alzheimer's?

The report issued earlier this year by USP on the relationship between

drug names and medication errors reviewed more than 26,000 records. It

found almost 1,500 different drugs implicated in medication errors as

a result of names that looked or sounded alike. The drugs in question

added up to 3,170 pairs, double the number of pairs found in a 2004

report. According to the document, 1.4 percent of the errors resulted

in patient harm, including seven that may have played a part in

patient death.

To be fair, there have been initiatives aiming to fix the problem,

such as a pronunciation guide from the United States Adopted Names

Council, and the " good naming practices " effort from the drug industry

trade group PhRMA (Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of

America), not to mention the Unique Ingredient Identifier system being

developed by USP and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, as well as

efforts to bar code all drugs.

Since 2002, the USP Nomenclature Expert Committee has been reviewing

drug-name pronunciations to ensure consistency. The council actually

changed the entry in the dictionary for ibuprofen to reflect a

suggested pronunciation.

But what happens when globalism comes into play?

" As far as pronunciation of words, my experience is that it's pretty

much all over the place, " Stanberry said. Americans and the British

pronounce " barbiturate " differently and both are right.

" Even if you were pronouncing something correctly, if you had a really

deep Southern drawl, it's not going to sound the same. Or if you come

in with an English accent or a French accent or a Texas accent, you

may be pronouncing it correctly, but it's not going to sound the

same, " Storch said.

And sometimes, no one seems to know the correct pronunciation.

Stanberry recalls being at a conference last year and listening to a

speaker repeatedly mispronounce a drug name -- or so he believed. " I

thought, 'This guy's just mispronouncing this terribly, and he's the

speaker.' But he actually studied under the guy who discovered the drug. "

Then again, the speaker was British. Stanberry is American.

Source:

http://news./s/hsn/20080807/hl_hsn/whatsinanamewhenitcomestodrugsplenty