4 Extremely Useful Tips Concerning Pharmacies
Not really a day goes by when our email inboxes do not fill with advertisements for medications. Many of these emails promise to deliver drugs of all classes by overnight courier with no prescription. While you can find legitimate online pharmacies, as well as the practice of telemedicine or cyber-medicine is gaining acceptance, this change in the way medicine is being practiced is rocking the foundations of the medical establishment. Having the capacity to consult a health care professional online, and obtain prescription medications delivered to your front door by UPS has broad social and legal implications. The internet facilitates making drugs available to folks who might not be able to afford to pay US prices, are embarrassed to view a doctor face-to-face, or are susceptible to pain, the treatment of which puts most doctors in direct conflict with the 'war on drugs' but on the flip side there is the question whether these pharmacies make drugs available to recreational drug users without the oversight of a licensed medical practitioner.
Health treatment in the US has reached a point where it's 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 cost of drugs in 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 on a yearly basis to buy their medications, as for the most part, these 'drug buyers' are elderly American's that can not 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 ability to both consult with a physician online and order drugs via the internet at discounted prices. This has resulted in consumers turning to online pharmacies for their medical needs, as well as in particular pharmacies with a relationships with a physician, which enable the consumer to completely bypass the traditional brick and mortar pharmacies, with the added benefit of having their physician behave as an intermediary between the consumer and also the pharmacy. As outlined by Johnson (2005) this is resulting from consumers becoming very dissatisfied in terms of working with 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 different professions within the heath care treatment system, he found that pharmacists had the bottom 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 that are picked up at a local pharmacy" (Johnson 2005).
What has brought so much attention to online pharmacies is the fact that it is possible to get just about any drug without having a prescription online. Many of these prescriptions are for legitimate purposes purchased through an online pharmacy online because the buyer is too embarrassed to visit the doctor or for other reasons including 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 such as AIDS, they additionally play a role in ant-aging (FDA, 2004).
Today a visit to a doctor is generally brief, much of the triage it's done by a nurse or possibly a nurse practitioner with the physician only dropping in for several minutes, if at all. In many cases the client is seen by a nurse practitioner. One of the arguments against telemedicine or possibly 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, thereby can not legally prescribe drugs.
Ironically when one compares the work up that one has to proceed through to consult having an online physicians and compares this to a face to face visit with a brick and mortar 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 physician prescribes any sort of medication they insist on a full blood workup they may also require that one has additional tests performed, for example.
