It is said that 79-year-old Leonard Kulisek had not suffered any major illness in the years before his unfortunate death, except he did have a prescription for his gout. The Walgreens pharmacist who filled Kulisek's prescription was working under the influence of OxyContin and hydrocodone. Instead of gout medicine, the bottle was filled with insulin pills. The next day, Kulisek slipped into a coma, and for the next 22 months suffered a series of health issues before he died.

The pharmacist admitted to being addicted to painkillers for eight years, and had stolen over 86,000 pills from the pharmacy where he worked. The jurors held Walgreens responsible for failing to catch the drug thefts or notice that the pharmacist had an addiction problem. Walgreens must pay $31 million dollars to the Kulisek family. Walgreens plans an appeal.

Medication errors can occur for a number of reasons. What can you do to avoid medication errors? According to Rx for Safety, the most common reasons that errors happen are:

• Incomplete information about a patient.
• Incomplete information about a medication, such as warnings or side effects.
• Poor communication regarding a prescription such as illegible handwriting, confusion between similar drug names, misuse of zeroes or decimal points or inappropriate abbreviations.
• Lack of appropriate labeling on the drug container or pharmacy shelf.

Before you leave the doctor's office, look at the written prescription. Can you read the handwriting? If you cannot, the pharmacist might have a problem reading it accurately. When you have your prescription filled, ask the pharmacist to answer any questions you might have regarding the medication. Check to make sure that printed literature is included with the prescription detailing information about side effects and proper dosages. On the side of the prescription bottle is a label that describes what the pill looks like. Check to make sure the description of the pill matches the pills inside the bottle.

For more information on additional safeguards, read Avoiding Medical Errors at RX for Safety.

For chronic pain sufferers, this might be the earliest beginning of the ultimate end for unrelenting pain. Columbia University researchers have been studying how pain works at the molecular and cellular level and discovered a key enzyme that cause nerve cells to send pain messages through the central nervous system even when there is no physical pain being experienced. So although you might not actually be in physical pain any longer, if your brain is being told there is still pain, you will experience the reality of pain.

Because of this find, researchers are hoping a drug can be developed that will shut down the messengers and the message.

Researcher Richard Ambron is quoted as saying that pain is not necessary. I could not agree more and have been an advocate for quality of life issues for long-term cancer survivors who must endure chronic pain without effective relief.

Just like Ambron, I do not think it is necessary that people put up with or suffer silently in pain either, and because the current methods of treatment can lead to additional health problems, this type of research is most welcome -- and long past due.