Online pharmacies have become increasingly common as an alternative to brick and mortar drugstores, offering possible cost savings and saving consumers one or more errands. Many major drugstore chains now offer online ordering in addition to their in-store services. A number of companies have set up exclusively web-based services as well. Some misconceptions exist regarding businesses that sell prescription medications online. Reputable and legitimate online pharmacies invariably require MORE...

I had not heard recently from Dr. Thomas Stossel of ACRE fame (see for example http://brodyhooked.blogspot.com/2010/04/federal-settlements-acre-perspective.html). However, the redoubtable Dr. Stossel now appears on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal (“Who Paid for Your Doctor’s Bagel?” January 23, p. A17; subscription required), to inform us that the Sunshine Act provisions included in the Affordable Care Act, due to take effect later this year, are MORE...

Our pal Merrill Goozner of GoozNews blog just posted this article in the Fiscal Times:http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2012/01/23/New-Cancer-Drugs-Affordable-by-the-1-Percent.aspx#page1 Gooz goes into the current problems caused by the high cost of new cancer drugs, relating facts such as: 84% of oncologists report that treatment recommmendations are modified due to the patient’s out-of-pocket costs Despite decreasing incidence of cancer, the National Cancer Institute projects a MORE...

OK, the end of January is approaching and I can’t get over the feeling of just spinnin’ my wheels.Work has been an endless parade of insurance rejects….” patient not covered….ask patient for new ID card….. non-matched cardholder…..refill too soon……we are rejecting this claim because it’s a day with an ‘r’ in it, ha ha !!…..and a million other reasons that I’ve never even seen before. People who have MORE...

Alix Spiegel of NPR did a very nice story this morning on the serotonin theory of depression:http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2012/01/23/145525853/when-it-comes-to-depression-serotonin-isnt-the-whole-story She quoted a number of notable psychiatric experts, but sadly not our friends Jeffrey Lacasse and Jon Leo, whom we have cited here previously:http://brodyhooked.blogspot.com/2011/01/what-do-we-really-know-about-depression.html Anyway the news report covered most of the bases–that MORE...

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued an alert to pharmacists nationwide on December 28, 2011 regarding two drugs with similar-sounding names but very different uses, warning them of the risk of serious injury if one drug is accidentally substituted for the other. Durezol is an FDA-approved eye medicine that consists of a 0.05% solution of ophthalmic chemicals. Durasal, meanwhile, is a topical wart remover. It is not formally approved by the FDA, and it consists of a 26% solution MORE...

Thanks to my esteemed colleague Daniel Goldberg for alerting to to this post–http://somatosphere.net/2012/01/the-banality-of-corporate-corruption-janssen%e2%80%99s-reimbursement-department-takes-the-stand-risperdal-on-trial-cont%e2%80%99d.html–by our old friend anthropologist Kalman Applbaum, for example as summarized here:http://brodyhooked.blogspot.com/2010/06/how-does-drug-industry-exert-power.html Dr. Applbaum, showing us once again that academic research is far from MORE...

The pharmacy smelled like sweat, dust and strong chemicals. The technician I had just hired was standing at the end of the counter. She was talking to her boyfriend on the telephone. It was against company policy to be on the phone while clocked in. I did not care. “I can’t stand it,” she said, “I just want to quit right now. This is awful. I can’t work in a place like this.” Her boyfriend calmed her down and I told her to go to lunch early. She was the noon to nine tech. The MORE...

“Jim, I will not talk to this man. He is impossible.” This technician is usually implacable. She is a veteran. She knows her job and for her to have to turn the phone over to me got my attention. “What’s wrong?” I expected her to say that he was abusive or that he used bad language or personally insulted her. “He says that his insurance should pay even though they say that he had the prescriptions filled in another drug store just five days ago.” Hmmm. I drew a breath and MORE...

January 12, 2012 CVS Caremark Settles Charges Over Prescription Prices By REED ABELSON and NATASHA SINGER After more than two years of investigation, CVS Caremark agreed on Thursday to pay $5 million to settle charges by the Federal Trade Commission that the company had misrepresented the price of certain prescription drugs in one of its Medicare drug plans, causing many older consumers to pay significantly higher prices than advertised. The settlement comes at a time of intensive MORE...

Well, Perhaps you and I need to take some responsibility for our “Lemming-Like” proclivities for running off a cliff without putting up a fight.  We actually acted like it was their profession and not ours.  At best, pharmacists acted like we were indifferent spectators.  The most glaring case in point was when Wal-Mart carefully rolled out the $4.00 prescriptions in Florida.  Pharmacists could have killed that dead if only 20% of Wal-Mart’s Florida RPhs would have MORE...

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released a memorandum in late December laying out guidelines for the use of social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, by pharmaceutical companies in marketing their products. The memo’s release came more than two years after the FDA held hearings on the matter in November 2009. Although the memo provides useful guidance, it is not nearly as comprehensive as industry insiders expected. The guidelines only deal with online discussions of off-label MORE...

Well, Perhaps you and I need to take some responsibility for our “Lemming-Like” proclivities for running off a cliff without putting up a fight.  We actually acted like it was their profession and not ours.  At best, pharmacists acted like we were indifferent spectators.  The most glaring case in point was when Wal-Mart carefully rolled out the $4.00 prescriptions in Florida.  Pharmacists could have killed that dead if only 20% of Wal-Mart’s Florida RPhs would have MORE...

Happy New Year!! I hope everyone had a safe and Happy New Year…..now it’s time to get back to work!! Network TV Update Things are moving quickly! I believe we have all the pieces to the puzzle now (patients, employers, employees, and pharmacies). With the recent WAG/ESI split, the network execs want to include that in the story line as well. The producers are now making daily phone calls to the “cast of characters”. While we can breath a sigh of relief that things are MORE...

Aw yuck. What a hellish “new year’s week” it was. It included a major software change in the way we submit on-line claims to insurances. The end result, in a nutshell, is that there are approximately 1,000 new and different ways for a claim to reject, and I think we saw every one of them. It included the usual insurance plan changes for customers, with the associated freak-out whentheir new copays were revealed to them at the cash register. “But I’ve always MORE...