When Maryland residents become sick or injured and need to take medication, they generally trust their medical professionals and pharmacists to give them the right medication, dosage, and instructions. However, as past victims of Maryland pharmacy errors can tell you, that unfortunately does not always happen. Doctors, medical personnel, and pharmacists are human, and will occasionally make mistakes. Unfortunately, those mistakes can be deadly.
For example, take a recent error where a 55-year-old man was given ten times the amount of pain relief medication than he should have been, tragically causing him to pass away. The victim—a painter and decorator—had been taking pethidine for some time to deal with back pain from a prior incident. However, he was then switched to methadone, as there was a shortage of pethidine. When calculating how much methadone to give the man, the pharmacist made a fatal error—he believed that the methadone was of the equivalent strength to pethidine. However, 5mg of methadone is actually the equivalent of 50mg of pethidine. Because the pharmacist did not double-check, and did not know this, he gave the victim ten times the amount of medication he should have.
Just a few days after taking this medication, the victim was found dead in his home by his son. A post mortem report found that he died in part due to methadone toxicity. After his death, his daughter also discovered a methadone leaflet, which warned patients not to take methadone if they had a lung condition—which her father had. This also raised questions as to why he was prescribed methadone in the first place.