When is a Drug Considered Defective?

Peter Olszewski

It would be difficult to go through life without ever using a prescription drug. Based on prescription sales, more than an estimated 131 million people use prescription drugs regularly. The main users are older people with chronic conditions, and they depend on these prescription drugs to survive.

When a doctor signs a prescription for you, you have to trust that they prescribed you the correct drug and considered the different side effects. When you receive from the pharmacy, you have to trust they gave you the correct prescription.

What if your prescription doesn’t work as it should or causes serious side effects that you were not told about? Then you may be the victim of a defective drug, but not always. Drugs can hurt you without being defective, and if they hurt you without being defective, whether or not you have an injury case may be in question. Let the medical malpractice attorneys at Scartelli Olszewski, P.C. explain.

What Makes a Drug Defective?

A defective drug is not simply a drug that is made incorrectly. A drug can be made correctly, and be defective. What makes it defective, in most cases, is the reaction of whoever has been prescribed it. A defective drug is a prescription drug that causes severe and/or potentially severe side effects that outweigh the positive effects the drug is supposed to have.

Types of Defective Drugs

There are many different ways a drug can be considered defective. If you believe this describes your situation with a defective drug, make sure to contact our medical malpractice attorneys for help.

• Mislabeled/Wrong Drug: In this case, the drug is doing what it is supposed to do, but it’s been given to the wrong person. Situations like this can lead to serious injuries where there originally were none, and your original injury becoming even worse.
• Manufacturing Error: Drugs are manufactured like most products, and sometimes errors can happen during the manufacturing process. The manufacturing process can lead to an ingredient being contaminated, confused, or shipped unfinished before the pharmacists use them to create the product.
• Design Error: Some drugs are manufactured and do not treat the issue they were designed to, or don’t treat them as intended for the ideal patient they were intended for.
• Pharmacist Error: Some prescriptions are put together on the spot because they contain multiple drugs that need to be taken on specific days, or because the ingredients are manufactured by different companies. Sometimes the pharmacist puts these ingredients together incorrectly.
• Misdiagnosis/Misprescription: Sometimes, the doctor who writes the original prescription is incorrect about what they should be prescribing. They misjudge how much the patient’s body can handle or what the patient is suffering from. In this instance, the manufacturer, pharmacists, and drug designer all did what they were supposed to do, and the drug did what it was supposed to do, but the patient should never have been prescribed the drug.

What Should You Do if You’ve Been Prescribed a Defective Drug?

Defective drugs can have long-lasting consequences, many of which you may not even notice immediately. It all depends on what kind of defective drug you’ve taken, how long, and what the drug was supposed to treat. If this describes your situation, you deserve compensation. Not only should you get compensation for the treatment you were supposed to receive, but also the treatment that you didn’t.

Before you can do that, you should see another doctor and have your current health inspected. You must learn how much damage has been done to your body and what further treatment you may need to care for the damage. Common side effects of defective drugs include:

• Birth defects
• Blood clots
• Brain injuries
• Cancer
• Chronic pain
• Death
• Chronic conditions
• Internal bleeding
• Memory loss
• Seizures
• Strokes
• Weight loss
• And more.

If you are experiencing any of these conditions, and a second medical opinion believes that you have been hurt by the original prescription, contact the attorneys at Scartelli Olszewski, P.C. We will help you get the compensation and justice that you deserve.