[escepticos] las medicinas y la mujer

[Ramon Diaz-Alersi]

Más, qué día llevamos: un evento adverso con resultado de muerte debido a un
clásico error de medicación (en este caso en la dispensación) en un
tratamiento de ¡medicina aleternativa! Si es que van a por todas...

De ahora mismo:

Deaths From Intravenous Colchicine Resulting From a Compounding Pharmacy
Error—Oregon and Washington, 2007

JAMA. 2007;298(20):2364-2366.

MMWR. 2007;56:1050-1052

Colchicine for injection has been available in the United States since the
1950s. Although not approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA),
intravenous (IV) cholchicine has been an accepted treatment for acute gout
symptoms. Several additional IV uses have been studied, including treatment
of familial Mediterranean fever, pericarditis, primary biliary cirrhosis,
amyloidosis, and Behçet's syndrome.1-3 More recently, outpatient use of IV
administration for chronic back pain has been advocated by alternative
medicine providers but is not an accepted practice. Colchicine has
well-known toxicities that limit its safe therapeutic use. IV doses that
exceed the standard single-use therapeutic dose of 2-4 mg per episode of
gout have resulted in life-threatening toxicity.2 In March 2007, two persons
from Washington and Oregon died after receiving IV colchicine for back pain
from an alternative medicine clinic in Oregon. This report describes the
investigation, which determined that a measuring error by a Texas
compounding pharmacy resulted in a fatal colchicine concentration that was
eight times greater than the recognized standard level. A subsequent review
of medical records revealed that a third death from colchicine toxicity in a
patient treated at the Oregon clinic also occurred in March and likely was
associated with the same compounding error. These deaths highlight the
potential risk from use of IV colchicine for back pain and the possibly
fatal consequences of measuring errors in compounding pharmacy products.


-- 
Ramón Díaz-Alersi