Abstract
There are a number of adverse drug events that occur per year due to ingesting the wrong medication. The present study examined whether including a picture of the medicine on pharmaceutical labels increased the participants’ ability to identify the medicine that they should be taking. Participants were shown fake pharmaceutical labels that included either a picture or text description of the medicine’s appearance, and were asked to identify the medicine being depicted or answer questions about the information found on the label. Participants performed better on questions relating to the content on the label than on questions asking them to identify the medicine. However, if the depiction was a color picture of the medication, participants performed better on pill identification questions than if the depiction was a black-and-white picture or text description. Thus, a color picture may help patients identify their medicine and reduce the number of cases involving the ingestion of the wrong medication.
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