Have you ever been reading material about or listening to an ad for a drug for your disease and wondered what ‘adverse event’ even means?
You’ve come to the right place!
This one is really simple. An adverse event is just a fancy term for when someone experiences something negative from a medication or product that you wouldn’t want to have happen. So, really, it’s a side effect without the larger number of patients affected.
An adverse event is considered serious when things like disability, hospitalization, something life-threatening, or death occurs. They also generally count birth defects if the mother was taking the drug or using the product while pregnant.
If you ever have a serious adverse event, obviously get help. That’s the first thing. Then you and/or your doctor can report the event to the FDA.
I’m sure you could also unofficially bring up difficulties during MedX (Sept 24-27) and the struggles to get your HCPs to hear you! I’ll be live tweeting the whole time so hit me up @kirstie_schultz, catch the live streams at the Medicine X website, and join in the conversations using the tag #MedX.