Drug Interactions Examined

Anyone hear anything about this? The premier episode of The Learning Channel’s new program, “Mystery Medicine,” which aired their first episode entitled “Brain on Fire/Killer in the Bottle” on May 30, had pharmacist Phil Johnston, Pharm.D. on there and showed how he helped find a previously unknown food-drug interaction.

The interaction caused tremors and nausea in a transplant patient at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, where Johnston was assistant director for education and research. According to the press release I read from the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP), Johnston discovered that an ingredient in a citrus-flavored soft drink was causing tremors and nausea that the patient was suffering from.

It has been long known that certain foods can interact with certain drugs and cause potentially dangerous side effects. Coumadin is one medication that I know of that has a long list of foods that you can not take with it because of the high vitamin K content in the foods.

I am going to be running a series here on Family C.A.R.E. that will look at some drugs and provide some information on the different reactions that they can have to stuff and what you should not be taking when taking them. I've had to call too many doctors over the years on trying to give my dad medication that he could not take with one he was already on. It's scary. So maybe I can help some of my readers out.

Later on I'll move this all to the FamilyCaregiver.info website and into a more easily accessed database setting. For now I want to start collecting the information on these drugs and Capella University and Blogitive are being kind enough to give me enough sponsorship to let me dedicate my time to this project.