Patient Detection of a Drug Dispensing Error by Use of Physician-Provided Drug Samples

Drug samples commonly are provided by physicians to patients in the outpatient setting. The use of drug samples, however, has come under scrutiny as critics argue that the practice is a marketing tool for the pharmaceutical industry. An additional problem facing the medical community is the growing rate of medication errors. Recently, there has been a national call for new methods of identifying and avoiding these frequently disabling events. We describe a case in which a medication error was averted through the use of drug samples.