Prescription injuries injure thousands of people every year. Injuries could be due to errors in prescribing the wrong medication, dispensing the wrong medication by a pharmacy, dosage errors, or prescribing (and dispensing) contraindicated medications. Sometimes it is simply one medication that causes the injury, sometimes it is part of a combination of medications that can work against a patient’s organs or body systems. Are your medications working against each other?

As many as 20% of folks with elevated blood pressure are taking prescriptions that actually raise their blood pressure. These may include antidepressants, NSAIDS, steroids, and estrogens.

Researchers pointed out that a majority of patients with hypertension have not achieved their blood pressure targets; use of blood-pressure raising medications may be a contributing factor for many in this population.

Uncontrolled hypertension can contribute to heart attack (by hardening and thickening arteries of the heart), stroke (by causing clots to form and migrate to the brain), aneurysm (by weakening arteries and causing bulging and bursting) , heart failure (due to the increased work of pumping the heart has to do), and kidney damage (by damaging the blood vessels of the kidney, interfering with the free flow of blood through the organ), to name a few. High blood pressure is the second leading cause of kidney failure – behind diabetes – in the United States.

Troubling for clinicians and patients alike is that high blood pressure travels with many of the conditions like chronic pain and depression that are being treated by blood pressure elevating medications. It is clear that managing these conditions must include full understanding of all of the medications the patient is prescribed. Obviously for millions of Americans this is not being done.