The always amusing Pharmacy Chick, a retail pharmacist, is not shy about pointing out when customers get on her nerves.
She recented posted her “top 10 ways you can tell you are no longer welcome at a pharmacy.”
Here they are:

10. You tell them your name is John Smith and they ask you to spell your [...]

[Read more →]

The ABC News program “What Would You Do?” stages various hot-button scenarios on hidden camera to see how people will react. In this case, a pharmacist refuses to fill a 16-year-old girl’s prescription for contraceptives on moral grounds — a scenario that has played out in real life more than a few times in [...]

[Read more →]

From the Colorado Springs Gazette:
A newcomer to the world of vending machines has joined the likes of sodas, candy, DVDs and toiletries — drugs.
Integrity Urgent Care … in northeast Colorado Springs recently installed a machine stocked with dozens of common prescriptions — antibiotics, painkillers, asthma inhalers and oral steroids. It dispenses patients’ medications like a [...]

[Read more →]

I read the following disturbing Q&A in Joe and Teresa Graedon’s People’s Pharmacy column this morning:
Q: I once worked for a pharmaceutical company that ordered a raw ingredient, diphen-hydramine, from China. I was a quality-assurance inspector and had to inspect incoming material.
That ingredient was trashy, with what looked like a lot of floor sweepings and [...]

[Read more →]

You probably didn’t know it, but May is officially Older Americans Month. Since many members of the eDrugSearch.com community are seniors, and we are keenly aware of their struggles in managing their prescription drug costs, we thought we would take this opportunity to share some facts about the older population that might surprise you, [...]

[Read more →]

I read an op-ed in the Dallas Morning News last Thursday that really impressed me, giving me hope that true healthcare reform may be just around the corner.
The piece was co-written by Republican Senator John Cornyn of Texas and Democratic Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa. Its purpose was to advocate the proposed Healthy Workforce [...]

[Read more →]

As mail order shows signs of becoming the dominant distribution system for prescription drugs in the United States, independent retail pharmacists are shaking in their boots.
So much so that they are turning to Washington for a bailout — or at least for a sympathetic ear.
As Drug Topics reports:
The fundamental message of the 2009 National Community [...]

[Read more →]

Motley Fool has an interesting take on the public’s current perceptions of the pharmaceutical industry — and the reasons behind those perceptions:
Is there a pill to cure bad PR? Not that I know of, but the health-care industry, and pharma in particular, could certainly use one. The sharply rising cost of prescription drugs [...]

[Read more →]

If one of the big pharmaceutical companies, like Pfizer or GlaxoSmithKline, asked you to fill out a detailed questionnaire on your health so that they could turn around and use this information to e-mail you prescription drug advertising, would you do it?
I’d guess that most people wouldn’t. In fact, many would be insulted at [...]

[Read more →]

On April 30, the secure site for the Virginia Prescription Monitoring Program was hacked and replaced with the following message (expletives deleted):
ATTENTION VIRGINIA
I have your s—! In *my* possession, right now, are 8,257,378 patient records and a total of 35,548,087 prescriptions. Also, I made an encrypted backup and deleted the original. Unfortunately for Virginia, their [...]

[Read more →]