I’m wondering how common it is.
I’ve had a perscription for Primidone for 3 years. Tiny white pills. But the refill I got a few days ago, not so tiny white pills. I figured they came from a different manufactuer, and took them anyway. Now I feel like I do, when I’ve skipped a couple of them. I take them for a condition, which is very mild to begin with, so maybe I’m being paranoid.
If they look different, just by being from a different manufacturer, doesn’t the box/other packaging give details, perhaps using it’s more “correct” name? And it should tell you how much of the required ingredient there is in each pill. If you can rememmber, or have an old box still around, you can compare that to the pills that you had before, and check that they are the same.
I would bring them back to the pharmacy to verify.
I’ve gotten incorrect prescriptions twice in the past 30 years. In both cases I took them back the same day, as soon as I noticed.
One time was when pills I was taking for a long period were very different. I noticed it later that day and took them back right away. An error had been made, and I was given the correct pills. I have no idea what the wrong pills actually were.
DO NOT TAKE ANY MORE OF THOSE PILLS UNTIL YOU CHECK WITH YOUR PHARMACY OR IF NECESSARY WITH YOUR DOCTOR. MISTAKES ARE RARE, BUT THEY DO HAPPEN. What will cure one person can be dangerous or even fatal for someone without that condition.
That won’t make a difference if they put the correct label/materials with the bottle, but filled it with the wrong pills. I’d confirm with the pharmacy to be certain these are the proper pills.
As to the rarity of mistakes, I’ll add that I have asthma and get bronchitis once or twice a year, so I get a prescription about once a month. So, as I said, errors are definitely rare, but they do happen. It’s possible they may have just switched to another manufacturer of the same drug as Celyn said, but definitely check.
All the info on the bottle is correct, but I will take them back tomorrow.
Oops, I admit what I was envisioning was pills in those metal foil packets - rather than little bottles filled by pharmacists - certainly better to check from horse’s mouth, so to speak.
My blood pressure meds went from white to blue pills. As soon as I opened the refill and saw the difference, I called the pharmacy. Turns out the generic supplier was different. But I wasn’t about to take them till I was sure they were the right ones.
Doctors and pharmacists are human, too; sometimes they make mistakes.
The following is possible TMI involving hemorrhoids:
My friend is a pharmacist and a man brought in a prescription for his hemorrhoids. The scrip said 2% nitroglycerin solution, but my friend is a smart cookie and realized that 2% was waaaay too much nitroglycerin to be putting on your hemorrhoids. She called the doctor’s office, the nurse said, “no, 2% is correct.” My friend persisted and insisted that the nurse call the doctor. The nurse got back on the phone and said, “don’t know how that happened, but the doctor says you’re right. It ought to be 0.2% solution.”
And that’s the story of how my pharmacist friend saved someone’s butt. 
I feel like an idiot for doing that. But at the time, it didn’t occur to me that they coul be something completely different.
My wife has been taking a thyroid medication for many years. Same prescription, same dose, same drugstore. Apparently, a new Pharmacist refilled it on one occasion, with a thyroid med for canines. When she got home and opened the package, she immediately noticed that the insert that came with the med suggested that she wrap the pill in a slice of cold cuts (baloney was mentioned)
Funny? Truly! But, what if she had not been familiar with the med, and taken it (baloney and all)?
End story…a lot of laughs at the drug store, and employment elsewhere for the boob that filled the script.
A few years ago, the pharmacy made a whopper of a mistake on me. Short backstory: my doctor had allowed me to become dependent on Halcion sleeping pills - rather than dealing with the cause, they just kept handing me prescriptions. The “detox” for this (at least back then) was a short course of low-dose antidepressants. When I went to the pharmacy to pick up these, there was a bottle of Halcion in the bag. And not even the normal “we can only dispense 15 at a time” but **one hundred ** pills.
Very odd that a pharmacy for humans would have meds for pets. The baloney advice is funny, since the normal advice for humans is to take synthroid on an empty stomach.
I’ve had incorrectly filled acrips twice. I noticed, because I read the pills before I take them, a good thing, since one of these occasions was the first time I got the med - so I wouldn’t have know the difference otherwise.
Pharmacy was suitably horrified, gave me a 10 dollar gift card. Hey, who wouldn’t take mystery meds for 10 bucks, right?
After they wre suitably horrified a second time, I changed pharmacies. These guys weren’t exactly on Target.
We always got our pet meds at the regular pharmacy. My dog (her name was Papers) was on Enalapril, an ACE inhibitor. Not too long ago, my husband went to pick up her prescription and the pharmacist said that they were very sorry, but they accidentally gave the medicine to someone else. That someone else, an older woman, happened to walk back in the store at that point to return the medicine. She said, “Thanks to this I have a new nickname. My grandchildren are now calling me Papers.” We think this is pretty funny, and now that Papers is gone, we take comfort in knowing that there is a family nearby that has a Grandma named after her.
I also have a pretty common last name. When they don’t check the address they sometimes wind up giving me the wrong meds.
I’ve always gotten my cats’ medications at the same pharmacy I get my own from.
Regarding the OP: The only mistake my pharmacy has made was in the number of pills received. But on one occasion, the pharmacist caught a really big mistake my doctor had made (I would have been taking twice the normal dosage, and nobody ever takes that much).
I never had a problem with the wrong prescription, but I have been shorted on pills more than once.
My mother, however, was given a prescription for an eye infection and ended up with ear infection drops. She called her doctor complaining that the drops were burning so bad she couldn’t use them. He pretty much told her to quit being a pansy and take her drops like a big girl. When I checked out the bottle I noticed it said “For otic use only”. She couldn’t have read the fine print because her vision was so bad at the time.
I’m not sure who really screwed it up, the doc or the pharmacist but they both got hell from me for safe measure.
I’ve only had a pharmacy screw up once, and that was to my benefit. They gave me 100 of my allergy pills, instead of 30. That was 10 years ago.
On the other hand, I’ve had doctors screw up several times. I understand doctors see tons of patients, but if it says I’m allergic to cephalosphorins on my chart, and the nurse asks me what I’m allergic to and I tell him/her, and then the doctor asks me what I’m allergic to and I tell him/her, is it too much to expect that they don’t send me out with a script for a cephalosporin? While I know the names of the classes of antibiotics I’m allergic to, I don’t know the names of the drugs that fall into each category. Fortunately, the pharmacist has always caught it. Yea, automated filing system!
UPDATE: I was right, the pills are the same, just a different manufacturer. Whew!