Consumer, don’t heal yourself!
You wouldn’t go to an accountant to decorate your residence, and you shouldn’t buy a home from a used-car sales person. So, why would you take a chance with your life purchasing medications from Internet pharmacies, especially before seeing your physician?
A recent study says doing the latter can hurt your health and wallet, and it notes that information related to products sold is “often misleading, incomplete, and inaccurate. Prices may be higher than at local pharmacies.”
Australian researchers found, after reviewing 104 online pharmacies in 14 countries, that while most provided some information related to the products sold, it was of poor quality and often lacking crucial information.” The missing data included items such as interactions with other medications; only three offered adequate advice on how to avoid an interaction. When the online pharmacies provided links to "related" sites, the research found, they included patient support groups – coupled with gambling and news web sites unrelated to either the product or the conditions for which it’s used.
"Consumers can’t make an informed decision about purchasing a medicine using information provided by e-pharmacies because balanced information about the benefits and risks of taking medicines was largely [un]available or of poor quality," the study states as reported in the April issue of Quality and Safety in Health Care.
Two products were evaluated: the decongestant Sudafed and the anti-depression herbal remedy St. John's wort. The study found shipping costs were as high as $38 from the online pharmacies, making the products far more expensive than buying them in a "brick-and-mortar" pharmacy or retail store. Forty of the 104 Internet pharmacies evaluated were based in the U.S., and of the 26 rated for quality of product information provided, five got "high" marks. Most were judged "fair" or worse.
The researchers didn’t identify the specific online pharmacies and didn’t respond for a WebMD interview. The study focused on only two non-prescription medications, but previous studies suggest quality and price problems apply to online pharmacies selling prescription drugs.
Dr. Bernard S. Bloom, professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, studies the safety of Internet pharmacies, and observed, "It's really dangerous out there. Consumers have no real way of knowing who is on the other end when they order drugs over the Internet."
In 1999, Bloom published research in Annals of Internal Medicine showing most Internet pharmacies provide poor quality product data, don’t have adequate safeguards to ensure medications are dispensed correctly, and charge more for products and services.
Bloom warned: "We found that you either had to have a prescription from an existing physician or you could get one online. The question is, `How do you know it's really a physician who is giving you that online prescription, and how can that person really diagnose your particular condition?’ It may be a physician, or it may be someone's Aunt Mildred."