Going to the Hospital? Watch Your Meds!
The Journal of AIDS recently had eye-opening information for AIDS patients going to the hospital: Anti-HIV medicines were prescribed or administered incorrectly a substantial percentage of the time at the hospital studied.
Even for physicians who routinely treat HIV/AIDS, the complexity of the therapies is challenging. In the hospital, an inexperienced doc — especially one still in training — or overburdened staff might be even more prone to make errors. At the very least, inattention to the proper regimen could permit the virus to develop stubborn resistance; even worse, wrong doses or drug mix-ups could jeopardize an HIV patient’s life.
The most common problem was wrong dosing intervals, leaving big gaps of time during which the HIV can escape the drugs’ control and begin to produce resistant virus. Example: BID dosing (twice a day, typically at 10am and 6pm) is not the same as every 12 hours. Also, food requirements were overlooked 75% of the time: Some drugs must be taken with certain types of food and some on an empty stomach, or they don’t work.
This information should be taken as a heads-up to HIV patients facing hospitalization — or anyone else on critical meds. Be sure what your treatment regimen involves, and if it doesn’t seem like it’s being correctly provided, speak up! For details, see Journal of AIDS, vol. 28, no. 5.
This article appears in February 22 • 2002.