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By Hannah Roberts
Everyone wants to save money, and the good news is that
purchasing medicine online is both easy and affordable. This
is
because online pharmacies have a much lower overhead
expenses..
The US Pharmacopeia (USP) has joined forces with the Food and
Drug Administration (FDA) together with the National
Association of Boards of Pharmacy (NABP) has established
quality control standards for all medications dispensed by
pharmacies throughout United States. Their intention is to
prevent consumers from receiving poor quality and/or harmful
medicines from online pharmacies.
US Pharmacopeia (USP), Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and
National Association of Boards of Pharmacy offer these ten
tips
to consumers who are thinking of buying health products
online:
1. Do not purchase from an illegal website. This means putting
yourself at risk. The danger of you being able to purchase
contaminated or counterfeit product is there, aside from the
fact that you may also be given the wrong product, an
incorrect
dose or worse yet, you could not receive any product at all
since most illegal web sites do not maintain longevity.
2. Purchasing an unsafe or inappropriate medication may put
you
at risk or cause serious health consequences.
3. Obtain prescriptions from your doctor before purchasing
drugs online. Moreover, it is not a good idea to purchase a
prescription drug online without seeing first your doctor even
if you fill out a health-probing questionnaire. The
questionnaire does not provide sufficient information that
would enable a doctor to determine if that drug is safe for
you
to use, if another treatment is more appropriate, or if you
have
an underlying medical condition which could be negatively
affected by the drug you are about to purchase.
4. Always try to consult a doctor before using any medication
for the first time. This way you can thwart any negative
side-effects that the medicine might cause you.
5. Avoid sites that offer to prescribe a prescription drug for
the first time without a physical exam, sell a prescription
drug without a prescription, or sell drugs that are not
approved by Food and Drug Administration. Taking drugs without
any physical check up can be harmful to your health and may
even cause death.
6. Do not buy from a web site that does not have any access to
a registered pharmacist that can answer questions.
7. Avoid sites that don’t contain information about the owner
of the site and do not provide a street address and phone
number to contact should problems arise.
8. If possible, refrain from purchasing from foreign web sites
because generally it is illegal to import drugs from these
sites and the risks you are facing are much greater. You could
actually be held personally liable for importing this drug.
9. Be very careful in dealing with sites that claim that they
have found a new cure for a certain serious disorder and offer
quick cure-alls for a wide range of ailments. Likewise, stay
away from sites that include undocumented case histories
claiming remarkable results.
10. Beware of sites that make use of impressive sounding
medical terminology to disguise their lack of research or
those
that claim that the government, the medical profession, or
research scientists have conspired to suppress a products in
spite of the effectiveness of the product to cure serious
diseases. And if you want to be sure that you are purchasing
from a licensed online pharmacy you may check out the site
with
the VIPPS and see whether it is a licensed pharmacy with good
standing.
About The Author: Hannah Roberts has an interest Shopping
related topics. To access more information on
www.tipsadvice.com/category/shopping/ or on
www.tipsadvice.com/2006/06/28/online_prescription1/,
please click on the links.
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