corner
Healthy Skepticism
Join us to help reduce harm from misleading health information.
Increase font size   Decrease font size   Print-friendly view   Print
Register Log in

Healthy Skepticism Library item: 19352

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

 

Publication type: news

Experts call for clearer medicine labelling
NursingTimes.net 2011 Mar 4
http://www.nursingtimes.net/whats-new-in-nursing/news-topics/public-health/experts-call-for-clearer-medicine-labelling/5026755.article


Full text:

A group of experts has recommended that familiar phrases on medicine bottles are made clearer.

Officials at the British National Formulary (BNF) have called for changes to be made to labelling messages – saying some current examples are unclear.

Many people do not know what the information on labels is saying, according to the research commissioned by the BNF – a drugs information group used by doctors, nurses and pharmacists.

The research claimed that labels advising people to “avoid alcoholic drink” could be misinterpreted by some.

Instead, it claims that such labels should carry the message “do not drink alcohol while taking this medicine”.

The word drowsiness is “not always readily understood” and should now be improved to say “this medicine may make you sleepy”.

The research was carried out by professor of pharmacy practice at the University of Leeds, Theo Raynor and colleagues.

His team tested a selection of instructions on almost 200 people aged 20 to 80.

The experts re-worded phrases that people found confusing, and then re-tested them in several sittings, including one-to-one interviews.

Prof Raynor said “avoid alcoholic drinks” was a good example.

“Our user tests have shown that the word ‘avoid’ can cause confusion and that some people think it only means they should limit their alcohol intake.

“This phrase will now be replaced by the instruction: ‘do not drink alcohol while taking this medicine’, which is far clearer.”

Other phrases include changing “do not take indigestion remedies at the same time of day as this medicine” to “do not take indigestion remedies two hours before or after you take this medicine”.

Another phrase, “do not stop taking this medicine except on your doctor’s advice”, becomes “warning: Do not stop taking this medicine unless your doctor tells you to stop.”

The revised phrases are included in a new, updated version of the BNF.

“The software used by large pharmacy chains and independent pharmacist to print instruction labels is updated regularly, so we would expect to see these new phrases appear within the next six months,” Prof Raynor said.

 

  Healthy Skepticism on RSS   Healthy Skepticism on Facebook   Healthy Skepticism on Twitter

Please
Click to Register

(read more)

then
Click to Log in
for free access to more features of this website.

Forgot your username or password?

You are invited to
apply for membership
of Healthy Skepticism,
if you support our aims.

Pay a subscription

Support our work with a donation

Buy Healthy Skepticism T Shirts


If there is something you don't like, please tell us. If you like our work, please tell others.

Email a Friend








Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909