[dbbolton]

>ALWAYS READ EVERYTHING YOU CAN ABOUT DRUGS YOU ARE PRESCRIBED!

I'm not trying to undermine your point entirely, but there is a flip side.

I can't tell you how many times I have seen a patient start a medication, then come back to the office within 48 hours because they coincidentally have every side effect that is listed in the pharmacy's information sheet or that they looked up online. The vast majority of these side effects are benign, present with next to no pertinent physical exam findings, and can't be definitively tied to the new med (like upset stomach, fatigue, headache, etc.).

Then they will start listing that medication as one of their "allergies", and if the nurse/doctor documenting doesn't dutifully probe what type of "allergic reaction" they had, they may end up not being prescribed that med in the future when it really is the drug of choice. A little nausea is a small price to pay if it kills a potentially life-threatening infection.

Also, I'm skeptical about the seizure risk. The thing about side effects is that they are supposed to be stratified according to risk. Doctors are typically aware of these risks, but patients aren't. So if your drug is listed as causing "headache, nausea, and seizures", there may have only been one patient out of millions who had a seizure while 50% experienced headache, yet the handout probably won't tell you that.

But even if it is a notable risk, I would be surprised if the propylene glycol you inhale from an e-cig could accumulate to a high enough level in the bloodstream to cause drug interactions, although I admit adequate research on the subject is lacking.

My advice would be trust your doctor first. If you don't trust your doctor, start seeing a doctor that you do trust. Then if you have a significant adverse reaction to a medication, talk to your doctor about it. Quite often they know something that you are not going to find by spending a few minutes on the internet.

As a side note, a good history includes asking about many habits. A lot of healthcare providers are guilty of simply asking "Do you smoke, drink, or use drugs?", but ideally the smoking aspect should be phrased as "Do you use any tobacco or nicotine products?". Patients usually won't read your mind and volunteer that kind of information. They will tend to give yes/no answers, so direct and specific questions are important.

[kwhitefoot]

> there may have only been one patient out of millions who had a seizure while 50% experienced headache, yet the handout probably won't tell you that.

Odd, here in Norway that's exactly the kind of information I expect to see on a leaflet inside the packet, not only on prescription drugs but also over the counter pain killers like paracetamol. Roughly translated from the Norwegian it says:

Rare side effects (more than one in ten thousand but fewer than one in one thousand patients) include: over sensitivity, allergic skin reaction/rash, reduced white blood count, anaemia, disturbed liver function. Very rare side effects include serious skin reactions. Liver function can be affected by paracetamol and alcohol abuse.

[throwaway729]

> yet the handout probably won't tell you that.

That seems like a major problem. Is there any reason that more detailed information can't be included? Mathematical literacy may be a problem, but that doesn't mean that there aren't millions upon millions of mathematically and scientifically literate consumers who could use this information effectively.

[dbbolton]

You would probably have to ask a pharmacist, but from the clinical side I can tell you most prepared health information that we can give to patients has to be very bare bones and comprehensible to essentially everyone at or above an 8th grade education level- I assume because it is considered too resource intensive by the publishers to produce multiple versions of the same information, and people with higher education typically have the initiative/means to ask their doctor the right questions or research the information themselves.

I'm not trying to justify any of this, but that's how it is.

Not sure if it will be helpful in the future, but I can tell you that descriptors used with side effects follow a standard convention:

    very common: > 10% 
    common: 1%-10%
    uncommon: 0.1% - 1% 
    rare: 0.01% - 0.1% 
    very rare: < 0.01%

But you will probably never know the exact origin of these figures (like how many patients were studied, what populations were included, how tightly the study was controlled, whether adverse effects were self-reported, etc.) without doing some intense searching. And even if you did, I doubt it would have a significant impact on your healthcare. I don't want to go on a tangent about the nuances of pharmacology in clinical medicine, so I'll just circle back to my point that you should trust your doctor, or else find a new one that you do trust.