Medical Symbols May Reduce Prescription Drug Problems

April 29, 2008

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A new system has been developed in France of symbols for medical conditions. The idea is that these medical symbols would be in things like drug inserts and descriptions. They would be used for showing things like what conditions a drug is used for and also the potential side effects.

When doctors are prescribing drugs there can be several problems. The most obvious is giving you a totally inappropriate medication. Probably a more frequent occurrence is that the patient might be better with a slightly different drug due to other diseases that they have, or is not warned of side effects.

One problem with drug information for physicians is that it is pages long and quite complicated. Virtually everything known about the drug is put in the doctors pages. This creates a problem since the important information gets lost in all those words. The idea of the symbols is to make certain important points about the drug obvious. These could include things like what disease the drug is used for, major side effects and if there any preexisting diseases that would limit its use. Each disease or conditions would have symbol so that it would be immediately very obvious.

To make up an example. A drug for allergies would have a nose symbol. If this drug was not be used by people with heartburn, the contraindications section would have a symbol the symbol for heartburn, maybe a stomach. If a potential side effect of the drug was headaches then in that section there would be the headache symbol.

If these symbols are gnereally adopted they shuould decrease the number of mistakes and help with better patient education by physicians.

Examples of the symbols in a short article.

photo credit: greg westfall