Comment on The way my fuck-ass pharmacist makes up the remaining pills in my bastarding prescription
papalonian@lemmy.world 4 days agoI’m sorry, I can’t continue this conversation. It’s clear that you’re just kind of saying things that sound right. Your only argument is, “the pills themselves cost nothing to make” while ignoring everything that makes the pill cost money. Economics and cost analysis does not work that way. And in 7 years of working in a pharmacy, never once have we ever sent incomplete strips of meds to the manufacturer to get a complete pack. That is just not a thing that happens anywhere on a regular enough basis for it to be taken into consideration.
theneverfox@pawb.social 4 days ago
What do you do with expired meds, does the pharmacy eat the loss?
Do you mix and match pills with different expiration dates to fill a prescription? From different manufacturers?
I’m genuinely asking. What I described is how things work here, and while our healthcare system is insane, this is one part that makes sense to me
papalonian@lemmy.world 4 days ago
It depends. In the US we have “prescription only” medication (things like antibiotics, diabetes meds, etc) as well as “controlled” medication (things like Norco, Xanax, morphine). With my former employer, we would go through the pharmacy and find non-controlled medication that was due to expire soon (3 or 6 months, I don’t remember) and send them back to our wholesaler for a partial credit. Packages had to be whole and unopened. With controlled medication, there is no sending back; the pharmacy holds the medication until it is actually expired, then sends it to be disposed of.
Different expiration dates, yes, different manufacturers, generally no but if there’s no better option we would. In the US we generally fill from stock bottles containing several hundred or thousand pills, so one bottle can last a few months worth of prescriptions. When we go from one bottle to the next, the expiration dates between the two generally won’t be the same. When I left the company, we had a system that scanned the bottle we used and could read the expiration date; if the med expired in over a year, the label printed would just have an expiration date of 1 year from the current date. If it expired in less than 1 year, it would give a notification, and we’d manually enter the exact expiration date on the label.
theneverfox@pawb.social 4 days ago
Ah. Laws vary by state, mixing and matching manufacturers is illegal in my state, the manufacturer must be on the bottle along with a description. I’m less certain about the expiration date thing, but I believe here they require them all to come back to the same batch in case there’s an issue (including improper storage of the bottle or something)
I’ve been told this is how it works by a pharmacist when they were having trouble filling my rx, and we were talking about controlled substances in particular