Prescription Drugs Online

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Kit
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Prescription Drugs Online

Post by Kit »

My wife and I have just moved to live permanently in P-O. In UK we took prescription drugs for high cholesterol and high blood pressure. Our UK stock is nearly depleted.
Does anyone have experience of buying prescription drugs online?

(We are in the process of registering for French healthcare and have visited CPAM and come away with a bunch of forms. However, it will be some weeks before we can get a French prescription after selecting a new doctor.)
martyn94
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Re: Prescription Drugs Online

Post by martyn94 »

Kit wrote:My wife and I have just moved to live permanently in P-O. In UK we took prescription drugs for high cholesterol and high blood pressure. Our UK stock is nearly depleted.
Does anyone have experience of buying prescription drugs online?

(We are in the process of registering for French healthcare and have visited CPAM and come away with a bunch of forms. However, it will be some weeks before we can get a French prescription after selecting a new doctor.)
Even if you are not registered, you can pitch up at your local doctor, pay full price for a session (€23), get a script, and pay full price for the pills at the local pharmacy (not much if they are generics). You can get prescription drugs on line if you've actually got a prescription for them:otherwise you are probably just making a free gift to some chancer in Latvia.
martyn94
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Post by martyn94 »

mariad wrote:My sister is also moved there and she is a patient of Diabetes type 1 but she is also finding difficulty in order medicine online. As they don't agree to deliver medicine without prescription of a local doctor.
I don't see how that could be surprising. If they are proper pharmacists in a proper country (so as to give you some confidence that the stuff would actually arrive) they would be breaking their law if they dispensed without a prescription. It's not my business, or any part of my experience, but it seems odd that anyone with type 1 diabetes should try to live here without the oversight of a local doctor. I recall getting a UK prescription filled in Australia once, but I did that in the flesh so I could explain the circumstances, and there was no language issue. I suppose I should that it was a "private" prescription (i.e. on my doctor's letterhead rather than on an NHS prescription form): I had just renewed my NHS prescription for the maximum permissible period, and knew that it would run out part way through my stay in Australia.

He could have charged me for it, but didn't. I still have some residual shame for feeling some dismay when I was assigned to "Dr Jan-Mohammed" at my group practice: of course his English turned out to be far better than mine, not to mention his doctoring.
tia
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Post by tia »

No decent doctor will just prescribe you with drugs for high blood pressure without checking everything out first. Nor for Diabetes for that matter.
Allan
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Post by Allan »

tia wrote:No decent doctor will just prescribe you with drugs for high blood pressure without checking everything out first. Nor for Diabetes for that matter.
In my experience, if you have existing medication, most professionals will take your word for it, accepting that your original prescribing doctor knew what he was doing.

Yes of course a doctor will carry out basic checks but I think it highly unlikely that he would start the process from scratch.
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Kate
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Post by Kate »

I think It's pretty unlikely that someone would ask for a specific blood pressure or diabetes medication if not already prescribed. As Allan says, I think that most doctors here would be happy to write out a scrip for a named (or equivalent bearing in mind it might not exist in France by that name) drug and take their 23€ for it without necessarily giving you a full medical, although as we know here, most docs will some routine tests ie blood pressure every visit anyway.
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Kate
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Post by Kate »

By email

I've been reading this thread on the forum and have a decent level of experience in this.

Generally I find that particularly for stuff like Insulin (type 1 diabetes) and Antihypertensives, the very least a Pharmacist in France would require is a bona fide prescription, preferably written by a French or UK doctor in generic form . My pharmacist here in the PO lets me have stuff from time to time but only because he knows me and of my professional background.

Doctors vary. In some cases I've heard of situations where they insist on starting from scratch, but in a few cases they just write a repeat Rx from peoples' UK one. Depends on the doctor and the severity of the condition. I cannot believe that anyone with Type 1 diabetes would just start insulin willy nilly. Did you know that Insulin overdosage is the preferred method of suicide in UK doctors ?!

Spain is a bit more free and easy, but even there most of the Pharmacies in LJ or Figueres require some sort of evidence of prescription of what are classed as POM's (prescription only medicine) in UK.
martyn94
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Post by martyn94 »

Kate wrote:By email

I've been reading this thread on the forum and have a decent level of experience in this.

Generally I find that particularly for stuff like Insulin (type 1 diabetes) and Antihypertensives, the very least a Pharmacist in France would require is a bona fide prescription, preferably written by a French or UK doctor in generic form . My pharmacist here in the PO lets me have stuff from time to time but only because he knows me and of my professional background.

Doctors vary. In some cases I've heard of situations where they insist on starting from scratch, but in a few cases they just write a repeat Rx from peoples' UK one. Depends on the doctor and the severity of the condition. I cannot believe that anyone with Type 1 diabetes would just start insulin willy nilly. Did you know that Insulin overdosage is the preferred method of suicide in UK doctors ?!

Spain is a bit more free and easy, but even there most of the Pharmacies in LJ or Figueres require some sort of evidence of prescription of what are classed as POM's (prescription only medicine) in UK.
This is entirely consistent with my experience, either directly or through close family, though I am obviously less authoritative than Kate's emailer.

I have asked French practitioners at odd times over the years for what are, for me, "repeat prescriptions" of my routine hypertensive drug, because I had simply run out. They have never attempted an investigation from scratch (and why would they, as the poster has said as I I understand him: no one is likely to invent a sudden need for 10mg ramipril without ever having it had it prescribed for them, and even if I did invent the need it wouldn't kill me). One, as I recall, asked me for evidence of what I was already taking, in the form of the card from my current dose, but otherwise they took my word for it. But they have always, as I recall, at least taken my blood pressure (though exactly what that might have proved is an interesting question). And they were entirely rational to take my word for it: that is one of the unfair advantages of being an apparently rational white bourgeois geezer with a slight command of French.

The relevant point for present purposes is that the doctors always gave me a valid prescription. I cannot imagine ever trying to swing a POM drug from a French pharmacist, as a random foreigner with no medical credentials, without a valid prescription, however harmless the drug might be if taken in the therapeutic dose. And when my doctor here became my "medicine traitant" (rather than an occasional soft touch for a repeat prescription), he stopped taking my word for things, and hit me for a very comprehensive set of "bloods" and a few urine tests.

My sister is in almost the opposite case: she has had the same (very thorough) "medecin traitant" for many years, has taken much the same drugs for most of that time, and had all her prescriptions filled at the same pharmacy just across from her home, mostly in the form that allows repeated doses to be filled, over time and within limits, from a single scrip. She has, I think, asked them about once in that time to "anticipate" the scrip that she had forgotten to get in time, but duly did get very soon after.

I have laboured this to point out, basically, that all this has nothing at all to with the original question: how do I get potentially lethal drugs, on line, without a valid prescription, from a firm, or a practioner, where neither of us know each other from a hole in the wall?

If you spend money on that prospectus, you are likely to lose it, and will deserve to do so. Even apart from the risk that the "insulin", if ever delivered, will just be salt water, and not even sterile?
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