Drug Information Questions

6/26/15

On Friday, I was able to answer quite a few drug information questions that had been asked of me. First the pharmacist received a call from the local provider office regarding a patient with mastitis who had both an amoxicillin allergy and cephalosporin allergy. She wanted to know what would be an appropriate next choice since she was currently breast feeding. According the the American Academy of Family Physicians there are 3 other acceptable options. The options include: ciprofloxacin, clindamycin, or sulfamethoxazole/trimethoprim. According to the manufacturer breast feeding is not recommended with ciprofloxacin although only 2.2% of the dose appears to be transmitted to the milk. In regards to clindamycin, the manufacturer says no breast feeding, but it does not appear to be in breast milk. With Bactrim they recommended only using it in mother's who babies are >2 months and are not immunocompromised. I called the provider and let them know the 3 other possibilities of medications so they could choose an appropriate therapy for the patient.

The other question I was asked by another pharmacist was can you split Abilify tablets? Although they are tablets, sources on the internet say you should swallow the tablet whole. It was difficult to find information as to why they state in the prescribing information they should be swallowed whole. In an article that was published in Current Psychiatry they created a handy list of medications that are acceptable to split and ones that are not. Abilify is on the list that is acceptable to split. In addition, many Medicaid formularies require tablet splitting as part of drug therapy to save on cost. I let the pharmacist know that it is acceptable to split Abilify tablets.