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>I am having treatment by a podiatrist for a neuroma (nerve irritation)
>in my foot and he wants to give me a cortisone injection-- one of 0.5%
>marcaine plain and one of dexamethasone sodium prosphate and
>dexamethasone sodium acetate. Does anyone know if they are ok?

The above was just received from this LIST.  For the 100th time, I wondered
why it is not the responsibility of the doctor or his/her nurse or someone
in his/her office to call the manufacturer and find out whether or not a
medication is safe for a patient.

I have a neighbor who just had back surgery.  He told the surgeon he was
allergic to codein and morphine and they made him very very sick, but the
doctor forgot to write it down and of course ge was given morphine and of
course he was very, very sick.  Isn't that just plain bad medical care?
Why are the doctors not accepting the responsibility to NOT make us sick or
sicker?  He said to the doctor that he had told him about his allergy to
morphine, to which the doctor replied, 'You are not allergic, it just makes
you vomit."  How can we, as a group, encourage the medical professionals to
realize that they are responsible, and that making us vomit is not
acceptible when it is not necessary.  There are other pain medications that
this man can take.  They are a bit more expensive, but the cost surely is
more than worth while when one considers the results of using morphine
because it is cheap.

There is a wonderfully strong and scary term, IATROGENIC illness.  It means
an illness caused - CAUSED - by medical treatment.  It is a scandal that so
many people in the USA are victims of iatrogenic illness and even death
brought on by iatrogenic causes.  Remember all the old jokes about the
operation being successful but the patient died?  It's no joke, and the
doctors know it.  The statistics about how many people die in the US
because of being given the wrong medicine are overwhelming.  Let's all be
vigilent and see if we can bring that number down.

OK, I'll get off the soap box.  Gayle Kennedy