News & Features

June, 2008

June, edition of M.D. Pharmacy's monthly newsletter. Articles regarding your medications, their safety, and the politics behind the price you pay for them. Please share this with your neighbors.

You Like Us: Two Independent Consumer Surveys.

Be sure you read the June issue of Consumer Reports and the article "America's Best Drugstores". Once again (for the eighth straight year) independent pharmacies won the highest rating over chains, supermarkets, and mass merchants in the category of overall customer satisfaction including service, knowledge, speed, and product in stock. The good news from Consumer Reports coincides with impressive survey results from the just-released 2008 WilsonRx Pharmacy Satisfaction Survey based on more than 34,000 responses to written questionnaires in which independents scored 92 out of 100 in the above categories. Ironically, along with these supportive reports, there has arisen a moral and ethical question regarding those patients who have been urged to use their insurance company's mail-order pharmacy. In hundreds of instances, the mail-order pharmacy has failed to supply the patient's medications in a timely manner, resulting in the burden of patient care to fall upon us, the independent neighborhood pharmacy, to provide emergency supplies to patients who have either switched their allegiance to mail-order, or who have never been, nor ever will be "our" customers. Providing this necessarily immediate service to non-customers places a costly drain upon our professional resources, technician time, inventory, and delivery expense, and negatively impacts the quality of care we are able to provide to our loyal customer base. These circumstances beg the question, "should the neighborhood pharmacy be responsible for covering the inadequacies of insurance company-owned mail-order pharmacies?"

Common Drugs Hasten Decline In Elderly: Study

Elderly people who took commonly prescribed drugs for incontinence, allergy, or high blood pressure walked more slowly, and were less able to take care of themselves than others not taking the drugs, U.S. researchers said recently. These medications block a chemical in the nervous system (acetylcholine) which is a messenger critical for memory. The results were true even in older adults who have normal memory and thinking abilities, although the study of 3,000 people included 40 percent who were taking more than one of the drugs. The effect is essentially that of a three-to-four-year increase in age. The tricky part…is that many useful drugs from many different classes demonstrate these properties, but in many cases newer drugs are available that do not have these effects, and that doctors should look out for them in elderly patients. (Reuters)

Doctors Say Insurers Step Over The Line.

For years a New Jersey patient took a prescription drug to keep his blood pressure stable. Then his Medicare Part D plan changed, and his new insurance carrier would no longer pay for the drug, but insisted that his doctor change his drug to one that was on their "formulary". His doctor wrote letters to appeal, to no avail. "My blood pressure went up astronomically on the new drugs," said the 57 year old disabled man. Another man tells a similar story. His doctor gave him a sample of Aciphex to treat his stomach ailment. The 64 –year old man said the drug worked like a charm. "Then I took the prescription to the pharmacy and they told me my insurance company said I had to try Prevacid first," he said. The substitute drug did not work as well, and now he's thinking of paying for the first-choice drug out of his pocket. Both men have come face to face with "step-therapy", the insurance company's way to require patients to try (and fail) with lower-cost medicines before they will pay for more expensive, but more effective newer drugs. Despite the insurance companies' claim that step-therapy is needed to curtail the nation's soaring drug costs, and offset advertising that pushes expensive brand name drugs, to doctors and patients the strategy is akin to the insurance companies practicing medicine, in order to enhance their already record profits. Doctors must call the insurance company in order to obtain authorization to prescribe a denied drug, but one physician said that he could not appeal every denial. "There is no such thing as a simple phone call to an insurance company," he said. "Every call takes 30 to 60 minutes." (New Jersey Star-Ledger)

Prozac May Help Slow Multiple Sclerosis.

The anti-depressant Prozac may help curb disease activity in the relapsing remitting form of multiple sclerosis, a Dutch study said.

The pharmacists and staff at M.D. Pharmacy, your neighborhood pharmacy.

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