SSS 2008-07-28（在线收听）

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This is Scientific American's 60-Second Psych. I'm Christine Nicholson, got a minute?

Actor Heath Ledger's untimely death on January 22, 2008, shocked us—and we are eerily reminded of it as we watch him twitch and quiver as the fey Joker in the current Batman movie, The Dark Knight. Perhaps Ledger's death, due to an accidental prescription overdose, hit the world as tragic because most of us can imagine ourselves falling prey to a similar accident. A study in July 28th issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine examines nearly 200,000 U.S. deaths due to medication errors from 1983 to 2004. The researchers specifically compared medicinal mix-ups at home versus those in a clinical setting. Apparently, home deaths due to taking meds with alcohol and/or street drugs shot up more than 3,000 percent in those two decades. Whereas, fatal errors out of home, and unrelated to any additional alcohol, only rose five percent. Accidental errors at home that didn't include any alcohol or street drugs rose pretty substantially too, more than 560 percent. You know, to be sure, people may be taking more prescriptive meds than they did in the 1980s and they are increasingly taken those meds at home. So is this hazard an acceptable by-product of the convenience of modern life? Or is it a problem that may worsen as more meds become available to homebound patients?

Thanks for the minute, for Scientific American's 60-Second Psych. I'm Christine Nicholson.

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