Most people throw it away or stick it somewhere and don’t ever read it. Well, your doctor told you how to take it and the instructions on when to take it is on the bottle, so……..?
The literature that comes with each prescription is not only good to read because it gives you a better idea of what you are taking, BUT it also lists the possible side effects of what you are daily. putting into your body.
Why is it important? What if the side effect felt like something else? what if you thought it just something that happened to your all the time and you took your normal OTC medication to help it. You had a headache and so you took your pain killer. And then it got worse and you don’t know what to do. You never thought that the headache had anything to do with the drug you are taking. Did you read the possible side effects?
Okay, here is the worst case scenario that I know of. (I’m sure there are plenty more). I was working with a mother to help her teenage son to work on getting healthy. He had been put on psychiatric medications. It was hard to get off of them and the doctors were trying different medications to see if they could help him. In order to help him, the added a drug Abilify. He seemed to be okay. His mother called me often to just talk about what she could do to help him build health, like getting him off of sugar, etc. He had been on the new drug for a week or so. She started to tell me some of the things that were happening at that time and felt it was just more “mental problems”. However, I knew the possible side effects of Abilify. He had them all and from what I read this could be very dangerous. She called his doctor right away who immediately took him off of it.
Fortunately, i had read the various side effects and recognized what was actually happening to her son. If she had diligently read the literature for the side effects of the drugs he was taking, she would have recognized it earlier.
So, it is important to read the literature. And if you threw the literature away, you could always go to drugs.com. They post the literature.