I was prompted to take on the pharmaceutical world again when I picked up a delivery receipt from one of my mother's meds. which indicated that the price had jumped from $23 for a 30-day supply to $45.00 for a 30-day supply. Before I jump to conclusions, of course I will need to call the pharmacy, which I haven't yet done. After some searching around, I find that I can sign her up to get prescriptions for 90 days for the flat rate of $10.99 at the local Hannaford Brothers grocery store pharmacy. I just need to do that, and then be responsible for picking up the prescriptions when she runs out.
The weekend proved to be a time when I could check in with Langdon Place nurses to discuss my mother's OTC medications, their strength and the numbers of pills purchased at a time. It was clear to me that I could save a lot of money if I purchased aspirin, colace and Depends somewhere other than Care Pharmacy, which has a monopoly on delivering items to Langdon Place. So....Care had charged $7.19 for a bottle of 30 aspirin, and I could purchase it at Wal-Mart (much as that killed me) for $4 and something for a bottle of 500 - enough for a year and a half at her current rate of 1 per day. You get the picture. The picture is that elderly patients are constantly being screwed over, and if they have no advocate or no family nearby, they just have to pay the price.
While focused on medication, and having heard a news report in passing last week about how Fosamax can cause bone and muscle aches and pains down the road, I went online to read about Fosamax, since my doctor had prescribed it for me a few years ago, over some feeble objections on my part. And here's where I would like to blast off about being part of the guinea pig generation. Some of you have heard this rant before......
In 1966, I obtained a prescription for birth control pills, Norlestrin to be exact. The doctor (a man - there weren't any women doctors that I knew of at that time) said to me "When you stop taking these when you want to get pregnant, you'll be 'as fertile as a turtle.'" That was it. That was the entire discussion about what I was about to start ingesting. Now don't get me wrong, at the time, the idea of preventing pregnancy until I was out of college was a VERY attractive option. The pill was the new thing, and we were told how safe it was, how much more convenient, how non-interruptive, etc., etc. All of the hype was true, but what they neglected to tell us, or actually didn't know, was that after taking the pill for about 5 years, and suppressing our own hormone systems, that some of us might have trouble kick-starting our hormones and hence ovulating. In my case, it required a dose of fertility drugs (Clomid, to be exact) before my system started up again. That time, the doctor, ( a man again) said "Be sure not to get pregnant THIS month, because you might have quintuplets." Wouldn't that have been dandy? So after a year of trying to get pregnant and not knowing why I couldn't, I had the magic bullet, so to speak.
A similar scenario occurred with hormone replacement therapy to ease the symptoms of menopause. I even said to my doctor at that point, "Are you sure there won't be any long-term side effects?" "Oh no," she said, (note the change in gender), "these pills will help prevent heart disease, memory loss" and I've forgotten what all else.....The rest is history, of course, when the studies were really complete on women and HRT, and the lovely little pills were shown to have no effect on heart disease and that they raised the risk of breast cancer, etc., etc.
So....when the same doctor recommended Fosamax when my bone density scan showed some bone loss post-menopause, I said, "What are the long-term effects of this medication?" "Oh," she said, "there are no problems that I know of, but there also haven't been any long-term studies." I should have just refused at the time, but since my mother had had two hip replacements and was clearly shrinking as she aged, I thought it was worth the gamble. Well, duped again. The main ingredients in Fosamax are the same ingredients in corrosive cleansers, and the current research is showing that long-term use of the drug may actually cause your bones to stop shedding dead bone cells while building new bone cells, creating instead, a kind of shell-like, brittle exterior to the bone, not to mention the potential gastric side effects of putting this corrosive substance into your stomach and esophagus. It turns out that when the pharmaceutical companies lost all of the money on hormone replacement, they conjured up "osteopenia," the precursor to "osteoporosis," and created the preventative for it in the form of Actonel, Fosamax and Boniva.
Those of us who are in our sixties, have been the guinea pigs for some grand pharmaceutical experiments, and I, for one, am tired of it. I do take responsibility for agreeing to go on these various medications, but now that we have the internet and the ability to do some research on our own, I'm saying "enough already." Luckily I haven't been placed on one of the cholesterol-lowering drugs which they are now determining don't REALLY reduce the build up of placque in the arteries, even though they do lower the "bad" cholesterol.....(brought to you by the same folks who created Vioxx and other heart attack provoking medicine). (What do we think will be the long term effects of Viagra???)
It's time to smarten up, it seems to me, because no matter what John Edwards may say in his campaign speeches, the pharmaceutical companies will do whatever it takes to keep a healthy bottom line, regardless of the health of their consumers!
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