On common practices.

[theweaselking]

An argument I have had with the lovely torrain:

I triple-check medications. I read all the notes and when a pharmacist hands me a bottle of pills, I check to make sure the label matches the prescription and also that the note pamplet matches what I went to the doctor for. Most times this results in the pharmacist explaining a perceived inconsistency that's my fault for being a non-expert, occasionally I catch a mistake.

I double-check fast food orders. I read the screen and if something looks wrong on the display-to-workers with respect to what I've said to the cashier, I ask about it. Sometimes this has them explaining to me why I don't know their system, more often I've found a mistake.

My Lovely Wife thinks I'm weird for second-guessing pharmacists AT ALL, and for obsessively double-checking fast food. Me? Google is one of the smartest people I know. If my pharmacist and my doctor disagree, I want to know why. If Google disagrees with either, or both, I kinda want to know why. And if the instructions to the people who MAKE my food disagree with what I want my food to be, I want to know whay.

And beyond that, I was raised with the practice that, as soon as you accept a medication from a pharmacist, you IMMEDIATELY check the medication and the dosage to determine if it matches the prescription, because pharmacists are awesome and RARELY make mistakes but the one time they do make a mistake you are totally fucked. So you check their work.

[Poll #1930624]

Comments

[torrain.livejournal.com]

I will note that I now obsessively double-check the dog's medication.

(I might start double-checking mine, but it hasn't come up since I was given cause to double-check the dog's, so I will go with the "former behaviour" answer to the poll.)

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

The second one is a "hell yes". Even more so if someone is in the hospital, where people are way more rushed and a much wider range of both drugs and ailments are plausible.

[skiriki.livejournal.com]

Well the fast food sort of usually comes double-checked by the cashier, since in my neck of woods the part of "fast" is not that fast ("food" fortunately is), and there's usually more than enough time for them to review the order or focus on what they are doing. At worst, the only thing I need to correct is to yelp "no ice!" as they are about to reach for it (soft drinks are usually cool enough to drink as-is, and ice just texturally distracts me and creates unwanted diluted spots in drinks), but that's sort of understandable reflex since most people take their icy lumps without further thought.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Now, but that doesn't count because it happened after I caught a mistake you missed.

[torrain.livejournal.com]

You learnt from always being taught. I learnt from one horribly frightening experience. I still learnt, yes? :)

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

You have still never obsessively checked your personal meds. wut.

[torrain.livejournal.com]

Blind spots, I has them. I fix them once I become aware. :)

[rdmasters.livejournal.com]

As a coeliac sufferer, checking both is a must for me. Substituting a medication can mean that I get something that contains (or could be contaminated with) gluten.

As for fast food, it also means (depending on the venue) keeping an eagle-eye on the preparation process. Example: Takeaway coffee, yesterday. I see the lids are put down on a counter with the order written on them - good, no chance of mess-up. Then I see the cappuchino topping being sprinkled on the same counter, and the lids being pulled through it. So I ask 'is the topping gluten free?' Of course it isn't, so I get them to re-make the machiattos that they just made poisonous for me. Fortunately, they were very good about it, but some places get right hostile about things.

And just to forestall anyone who says 'that could not possibly have hurt', 20ppm gluten (that's about 20mg across an entire day) is enough to trigger an auto-immune response in a coeliac sufferer. 10mg/day (or abour 1/350 of a slice of bread) is regarded as the maximum safe exposure.

[harper-knight.livejournal.com]

Also, there are people like me who really, really like ice.. at places that do self-serve fountain drinks, like BK, I usually fill my cup all the way up with ice and then just top it up with drink more often than I would otherwise have to. Also I eat the ice when I'm done.. I like ice.

[harper-knight.livejournal.com]

Double-checking meds is obvious to me; you'd have to be crazy not to. For fast food, it's a 'sometimes'.. I'm usually ordering pretty straightforward things, hard to mess up. When I order my burger or sandwich with a bunch of extras on it, then yeah, I check to make sure that's what they're making.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

you'd have to be crazy not to.

YES THIS IS HOW I GREW UP.

And yet, a surprising-to-me number of people who take more prescriptions than I do are all "wut? Check the pharmacist?"

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Related: Domino's "gluten-free pizza" is gluten-free... but cooked in the same ovens on the same unwashed surfaces as their gluten-rich pizza. So "not, in any way, gluten-free"

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

I marked 'Sometimes' to meds because I do check, but not to the extent you do.

[sbloyd.livejournal.com]

I sometimes check those same things, but recently after buying a month-long pill case jobby and distributing my wife's prescriptions into it, I found that there were only 30 pills in my wife's 45 pill thyroid scrip. Now I check every time, and at the same time I wonder... how many times have we been shorted by the pharmacists? It won't stop bugging me.

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

I don't know the standards for gluten tolerance, so what does "in the same oven" mean, here? Is normal outgassing from a hot glutened pizza enough to cause a reaction? Because I certainly doubt Dominoes is doing the wood-fire thing where it's the exact same cooking surface, they're using either pans or pizza screens to cook on, which are cleaned (hopefully) between uses. Would a legit gluten-free place have separate ovens for their gluten and non-gluten pizzas?

Other vectors would be by touch (gloves (non-latex?) can be changed between pizzas), and the cutting, which can use a different different cleaned knife. I've done this for Muslim customers, who one would think have a standard beyond any allergy. Here I don't know their standards, certainly they don't change gloves, a remote 'possibly' for the knife. They're probably just advertising ingredients, as you mentioned.

I do know that there's a fairly hip Mongolian grill chain near here that specifically have a gluten-free tag you can add to your plate, but I don't know the extent they go for tools and surfaces. Probably just tools, not sure if they have a separate area of the grill that's walled off for gluten people.

Mostly I'm commenting because I'm high and I'd like to hear more about gluten tolerance.

[snakey.livejournal.com]

Sometimes I wait til I get home to check my meds, because anxiety. But then I check them VERY THOROUGHLY, especially the Patient Information Leaflet that comes in the box of pills (why oh why do they give you a pitiful printed sheet with hardly any info on it here in Canada? - I look the PIL up online). This also helps catch out when doctors have prescribed you something *really fucking stupid*, such as something that says DO NOT TAKE IF YOU HAVE (OTHER CONDITION) and the parts that warn about side effects, which I have been fucked over by SO MANY TIMES. Had some life-threatening pharmacist (and lazy doctor) mistakes, so no way am I *not* checking that shit.

[catlin.livejournal.com]

Here, you Have to double check the meds. In fact, in some cases it is best to -count- them, because once you leave, you are SOL. The pharmacist can't take them back, and won't admit guilt if they short changed you.

[skiriki.livejournal.com]

But of course. :) It just seems that for vast majority of customers, the idea of iceless drinks doesn't enter their mind until they see someone else ordering one without ice and decide to try it as well; ice + soda, that's the way it is always done, right? Ice crunchers are a class of their own. :)

[skiriki.livejournal.com]

Sadly, I suspect that Domino's "gluten-free pizza" is not aimed at those with genuine gluten-related problems (such as rdmasters, above), but for that food fad group which has picked gluten as the next Devil in need of being exorcised from their diet in order to magically make everything all right with themselves. Cut gluten and lose weight! Cut gluten and become younger! Cut gluten and all diseases are cured!

Which pisses me off something fierce, as that works horribly in downplaying the actual problems faced by coeliacs. Certainly, it may improve the availability of gluten-free products on the markets. But I hope to Celestia that whoever manufactures them actually knows that there are people for whom it makes a difference between life and life-in-horrifying-agony-with-possibility-of-death, and that they're not eating gluten-free just to be trendy.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

I take a more relaxed approach to checking my meds than you because ...

* I'm an ex-pharmacist. Haven't practiced for 24 years, but enough still sticks that I'm familiar with most of the stuff I'm prescribed and I know how to read the literature to understand the newer items. (Our pharmacopoeia, outside of a few specialities, has been surprisingly static since the early 1980s.)

* The pharmacy I use is just across the street from my front door -- less than five minutes' walk away, most of it waiting for a gap in the traffic so I can cross. So if I discover a mistake when I get home I can get it fixed within fifteen minutes.

And as for fast food ... I avoid walk-up burger joints and use carry-out places (Indian and Chinese). And note that the error rate has fallen close to zero since I started using an online ordering service -- presumably because they're reading a legible order list, rather than trying to take dictation over the phone in a noisy environment.

[sparkindarkness.livejournal.com]

I check medication to make sure the chemist has given me what the doc sent - and that they haven't made a mistake and that I truly understand what I'm suppoed to take. Because medication mistake = DEATH!

I don't check against google though - my doc has prescribed them, why I should listen to random net folks over him is bemusing

I don't check take away. If my take away order is wrong... then it's wrong. C'est la vie.

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

Hunh, thought I'd answered this yesterday...

I check fast-food orders at the counter; if they cash is set up to show the order while it's being rung-in, I check it there too in hopes of heading off errors before they become a fuss to fix.

Prescriptions I check only to make sure the name and number is the same, and I'll admit I'm not too careful in doing so. I haven't had much practice, as I've had maybe 4 or 5 prescriptions (in total, counting renewals) in the past decade.

-- Steve's been lucky that way.

[moiread]

I think for me, I'm just the personality type who does that sort of thing. Like how I always lock my door behind me by habit when I enter the apartment, look over the charges on receipts, measure furniture before I buy, etc. I'm both highly practical and a stickler. It's what I do.

Probably for the best, though, because when my meds get messed up, I have seizures and/or cardiac events and/or wind up in the hospital anyway after a week of not being able to keep anything down. So yay for being a stickler already!

[moiread]

> why I should listen to random net folks over him is bemusing

Random net folks? Probably not. But Google in general can be extremely useful.

I had a medication for awhile that gave me seizures. Neither my GP nor the ER doctors would believe me that it was that medication, even though the evidence said that it was the only possible culprit, until I went and looked up the clinical trial results myself and found that it was a very rare side effect. (Not actually that surprising -- anyone can have seizures if you mess with certain processes enough, so any medication messing with any of those processes can potentially cause seizures.) We changed the medication and the seizures stopped right away.

I have other stories like that. Doctors are not omniscient. They have a particular area of knowledge, but it is not perfect, and even among specialists, often a doctor knows a lot more about one area of that specialty than the others. (I have been sent from one gastroenterologist to another within the same city, for instance, because most of their respective knowledge bases were focused on different gut diseases and once we determined what mine was, it was better to swap to the guy who knows more about that one.)

I mean, I have friends who are computer engineers, but that doesn't mean I assume they know absolutely everything about every piece of hardware or software available in this country, or about every single potential problem that either one might have. They know more than I do, but sometimes they look shit up on Google too. So does my doctor. Why shouldn't I? :)

[franklanguage.livejournal.com]

I don't eat fast food. At all. Ever.