Affordable Pharmacies Overview
Not really a day passes by when our email inboxes do not fill with ads for prescription medications. Many of these emails promise to deliver drugs of all classes by overnight courier without a prescription. While you'll find legitimate online pharmacies, and also the practice of telemedicine or cyber-medicine is gaining acceptance, this change within the way medicine will be practiced is rocking the foundations of the medical establishment. Having the capacity to consult a physician online, and obtain prescription drugs delivered to your doorstep by UPS has broad social and legal implications. The internet facilitates making drugs available to folks that may not be able to afford to pay US prices, are embarrassed to determine a physician face to face, or are susceptible to pain, dealing with which puts most doctors in direct conflict with the 'war on drugs' but having said that there is the question whether these pharmacies make drugs available to recreational drug users without the oversight of a licensed medical practitioner.
Medical treatment within the US has reached a point where it is expensive and impersonal which has caused the consumer to become generally unsatisfied with the medical establishment as a whole. Examples include the huge differences between the expense of drugs within the US and Canada, long wait times in US pharmacies, and poor service in general. Perhaps realizing this, US customs appears to tolerate the millions of Americans that visit Canada annually to buy their medications, as for the most part, these 'drug buyers' are elderly American's that cannot afford the high cost of filling their prescriptions within the US.
Rather than to travel to Canada or Mexico millions of Americans are now turning to the web for both their medical needs. Telemedicine (or cyber medicine) provides consumers with the capability to both consult with the physician online and order drugs online at discounted prices. This has resulted in consumers turning to online pharmacies for their medical needs, medicines as well as in particular pharmacies with a relationships with a doctor, which enable the consumer to completely bypass the traditional brick and mortar pharmacies, with the added advantage of having their physician act as an intermediary between the consumer and also the pharmacy. In accordance with Johnson (2005) this is as a result of consumers becoming very dissatisfied when it comes to managing both brick and mortar pharmacies and medical experts. As Johnson, notes, "Consumers tend to be more more likely to know the name of their hairdresser than their pharmacist." When Johnson (2005) rated the various professions in the health care system, he found that pharmacists had the minimum interaction with their patients than did any other group. Today, as a result of this "consumers are buying 25.5% of their prescriptions online, opposed to 13.5 percent of which are picked up at a local pharmacy" (Johnson 2005).
What has brought so much focus on online pharmacies is the fact that it really is possible to get just about any drug without a prescription online. Many of these prescriptions are for legitimate purposes purchased through an online pharmacy because the buyer is too embarrassed to visit the physician or for other reasons such as the unavailability of FDA approved drugs to the consumer. These drugs may include steroids that due to their misuse and being classed as a classed a category three drugs, are seldom prescribed by physicians. These drugs have a useful purpose to those affected by any wasting disease for example AIDS, they additionally play a role in ant-aging (FDA, 2004).
Today a visit to the physician is mostly brief, much of the triage it's completed by a nurse or a nurse practitioner with the physician only dropping in for a couple of minutes, if at all. In lots of cases the patient is seen by a nurse practitioner. Among the arguments against telemedicine or even a better term is cyber-medicine, is that the physician won't have a physical relationship with the patients and therefore is in no position to make a diagnosis, and therefore can not legally prescribe drugs.
Ironically when one compares the work up that one has to go through to consult by having an online physicians and compares this to a face to face visit with a local doctor, one finds that the on-line physician, in several cases, has a far better knowledge of the patient's medical condition than does the physician who meets face to face with the person. In most cases before an on-line a doctor prescribes any sort of medication they insist on a full blood workup they may also require that one has additional tests performed, for example.
