Online pharmacies can make buying prescription drugs easier and more convenient, but if you don’t take proper safety precautions, you can encounter deadly effects. So before purchasing your prescription medicine online, make sure you do a little research and find out the risks involved.
Online pharmacies almost always have looser standards for buying prescription medicine than your local pharmacies do. You can find medicines from anti-depressants and muscle relaxants to drugs for weight loss, sexual health, and skin care. Generally, you can find more popular drugs much easier and cheaper than others such narcotics, painkillers, and drugs that have a high abuse rate and come with special restrictions. Because some websites cater to people who shouldn’t get their hands on certain prescription medicine, these online pharmacies can charge three to sixteen times more than local pharmacies. But no matter what kind of prescription drugs you’re looking for, you need to take several safety precautions.
For example, you must determine which prescription drug suits your own unique needs. Many online pharmacies offer free secure online medical consultation, and you can even ask physicians personal questions about your medicine and personal health needs. However, online physicians don’t know you as well as the doctor you go to in person, and because they don’t know your full health history, they may overlook a serious health risk. The FDA advises consumers to seek the advice and consent of a licensed expert for each individual case.
In addition to verifying the compatibility between your body and your prescription medicine, you need to know all the information on the drugs themselves. Don’t overlook information on side effects, dosage, usage, drug interaction, warnings, and precautions. Investigators have found that some online pharmacies send customers counterfeit drugs or ignore special shipping instructions such as insulation or temperature-control requirements. Other times, prescription drugs from online pharmacies reach the customer past their expiration date, or come without instructions or proper warnings.
Many people looking to buy prescription drugs from online pharmacies choose Canadian websites. Canadian online pharmacies seem to have fewer problems than other foreign sites or even U.S. sites for a few reasons. First of all, all eighteen Canadian online pharmacies require physician-written prescriptions before filling orders, so they greatly reduce illegal or incorrect purchases. Many U.S. online pharmacies and all foreign online pharmacies, on the other hand, don’t require prescriptions, so people can unknowingly buy drugs that could harm them. Also, the FDA doesn’t have legal authority or the resources to regulate or inspect imported prescription drugs to the extent they would like.
Usually, you can buy from online pharmacies by either credit card or money order. Though this inexpensive and easy payment method might seem like the nicest thing about online pharmacies, it also makes it easier for kids and abusers to get their hands on prescription drugs that they shouldn’t have.
Once they know the prescription drug they need, many people prefer Canadian online pharmacies from a pricing perspective, as well. Because of different governmental price controls, you can find Canadian online prescription drugs 50-80 percent cheaper than those from some U.S. companies.
By Lisa Zyga