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Information from the healthetopics.com pharmacy team to help you find a safe and cost effective online pharmacy!
Buying prescription drugs online has become very popular over the last five years or so. Purchasing prescription drugs online has advantages that many people find very appealing. Some of the advantages of ordering drugs online are: you can easily compare prices of various pharmacies, cost savings!!, protecting your privacy, and greater convenience if you are not close to a retail pharmacy or have physical limitations that make it difficult to go to a local pharmacy. The full range of drugs are available online: pain medications, depression medications, blood pressure medications, diabetes medications etc.
There are many online pharmacies in the U.S. and Canada that can safely and legally fill your prescriptions, usually at a real cost savings for you. In fact many people are astounded when they discover that they can easily save hundreds of dollars or more every year by ordering their drugs online. Often when you hear someone talk about an online pharmacy they are referring to those large corporations also called mail order pharmacies that many employers now force their employees to use. But there is another type of online pharmacy that anyone interested in saving money can use to buy drugs online. This type of online pharmacy will treat you as a valued customer not just a number. Many of them (if located in the U.S.) will also gladly bill insurance programs if you have prescription coverage. The ease of online ordering and quick home delivery can make them an attractive alternative for many people!
To really save money you will probably need to use a Canadian pharmacy either online or in person (if you live close enough to Canada for this to be practical). The reason for this cost savings is because drug companies commonly sell their prescription drugs to pharmacies and pharmacy suppliers in other countries for less than their U.S. counterparts. In some cases these foreign pharmacies will pay as little as 1/10 what a U.S. pharmacy would pay for the exact same bottle of tablets or capsules! The twist is that is technically illegal for a person to bring (import) drugs into the U.S. from any foreign country, but the FDA has decided "semiofficially" to not bother shipments of drugs specifically from Canadian pharmacies as long as the drug shipped is: for personal use, not a controlled substance and would typically be considered no more than a 90 day supply. Drugs meeting these guidelines and mailed from Canada actually have been essentially left alone since October 9th 2006. In actuality it has been found to be very unlikely that a shipment of drugs from an online Canadian pharmacy would be bothered although shipments of drugs from other less regulated countries do run a high risk of being seized! Customs officials instead test random packages for counterfeit prescription drugs and medications with unapproved or ineffective ingredients.
Be sure to establish with your online Canadian Pharmacy that the drugs are actually going to be shipped from a licensed Canadian pharmacy and that the Canadian pharmacy you are dealing with is not just an intermediary (front) for a foreign pharmacy in some other country (if this is the case the drugs may be of questionable quality- research the pharmacy before placing an order). See information below that will help you to verify if an online pharmacy is considered to be reputable.
Never buy prescription drugs online without a legitimate prescription. This is especially important if the drugs are coming from a foreign country (including Canada) because if your illegal (no valid prescription from a licensed doctor) order is discovered and seized you could end up paying thousands of dollars in fines and even end up in jail (especially if the drug is a controlled substance)! If your prescription is for a controlled substance you must use a local pharmacy or an online pharmacy located in the U.S. to avoid any problems with U.S. Customs.
UPDATE: It is unclear how the failure of the recent U.S. legislation (5/07) or the change in the FDA's role will affect prescriptions sent from Canada to the U.S. Check back for news as it develops over the next few weeks. We will be checking for formal policy changes on a daily basis!
The official policy statement from the FDA (as it currently stands) can be found here.
A great brochure from the FDA with safety tips and info about importing prescriptions can be found here.
What can you do to help make sure that an online pharmacy is reputable?
Because it is difficult to determine how reputable any given online pharmacy is, it may be advisable to only deal with those that promote themselves using ads from Google or Yahoo. The reason is that to have their ads appear, these online pharmacies have been determined to be legitimate U.S. or Canadian pharmacies and they are required to pay a special membership and monthly fees to the approving organization or they will not to be allowed to advertise on Google or Yahoo. (If you find an online pharmacy simply as a search result then you should use other research means to determine if this online pharmacy is reputable!
Membership in professional organizations and trade groups that monitor business activity can certainly be one positive indicator that an online pharmacy is legitimate.
A web site you may want to visit is pharmacychecker.com, they provide ratings and profiles for many of the most popular online pharmacies.
One downside to obtaining prescriptions from online or mail order pharmacies is the lack of person to person contact with a pharmacist. This may make it harder to get day to day prescription questions answered on the spot. One web site that can help is RxList 'The Internet Drug Index'. They provide fast, reliable information to both consumers and medical professionals alike. In addition to drug information they have the search capabilities to help you identify a tablet or capsule based on the unique markings on it. Health professionals frequently use this site for a variety of reasons including attempts to help people identify unknown tablets or capsules that they have found.
Below is a free RxList drug search box (it uses 'fuzzy logic' so minor misspellings usually lead you to the correct drug information).
To get even more medical information you can also search
Taber's Medical Encyclopedia (53,000 definitions)
for free!
You can also find overviews of
treatment options for various conditions from Drug Digest
here. Although as accurate as possible, the
information on this page may not relate to your particular medical condition and
is not intended to be used in the diagnosis or treatment of any medical
condition. Always refer to your healthcare provider
before making any changes in your treatment plan. In addition any sites to which
we link may or may not contain information appropriate to your medical
condition. Contact us anytime at:
info@healthetopics.com (If you email us related to this topic, please include Online Drugs in
the subject line to help the email get routed to the correct healthetopics team member.)
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Drug Digest offers a great
drug interaction checker
here. They claim to have a
data base of 11,500 drugs. This tool can also look for interactions with food
and alcohol.
RxList
Drug Lookup
