After three months of this the patient is now 12 days ahead on their medication.
Some prescribers are diligent enough to watch the dates and indicate on the prescription "Do Not Fill until 30 days Past Late Date Filled" or indicate a specific date to fill. Pharmacists and their technicians love these physicians.
But so many physicians, too many actually, don't pay any attention to the dates. Tell me this, Batman... WHY are they doing this? They see the patient every 26 days and then hand out prescriptions for meds that should last 30 days. Why?
Stop this nonsense.
If you're a physician doing this, STOP IT. You're contributing to the opioid epidemic. If you're a pharmacist, DON'T FILL THE MEDICATION until it's due. Sure, people go out of town and there's extenuating circumstances and you should use your best judgement, but if this is going on month after month after month, YOU need to step up and do your best to stop it.
Bullshit The majority of opiod deaths are coming from fentanyl and heroin overdoses.This occurs when addicts can not get their opioids in legitimate manner. The number of opiod RXs is way down while opioid deaths are way up.This totally disproves your point.In Europe addicts get clean needless and standardized heroin so they have very few overdoses.In the US we force them to a black market and let them get poisoned.
ReplyDeleteI think you need to look up the word "contribute" in the dictionary.
ReplyDeletein Europe, addicts get clean needles and standardized heroin? do you also provide free medication for diseases that could cause death if NOT treated, such as cancer, HIV, HEP-C, etc....?????
ReplyDeleteif not, then youre doing it wrong; helping those that don't want help should come AFTER those that do want help, otherwise youre just enabling them.
And when we go to the pharmacy on day 30 they blame us for waiting until the last minute when they have to order our drug. I believe you have blogged that our poor planning isn't your problem. You can't have it both ways with controlled substances.
ReplyDeleteBest time to ask for a refill is when you have three pills left.
ReplyDeleteanonymous 8:25AM, you can bring/call it in a few days ahead of time and we will have it ready the morning it can be filled.
ReplyDeletemy pharmacy allows controls to be filled on day 28, UNLESS the dr indicates when it should be filled. you can always bring it in early and we will hold until fillable; this is being proactive.