Pharmacy Tech Classes

Americans who complain about prescription drugs in their pharmacy fall into more myth than fact.  Here are nine pervasive myths on drugs and the pharmacies that deliver them:

Myth #1: The United States Has the Worlds Most Expensive Drugs

In fact, drug prices in the US are similar to that of most other countries.  An economist has found that Switzerland, Germany, Canada, and Sweden have higher drug prices on average.

Myth #2: Seniors Pay Too Much for Drugs

According to a study, 65 percent of individuals on Medicare have a prescription drug plan which assists in their purchasing of prescription drugs.  While some argue that seniors pay too much for drugs, seniors can find a multitude of discounts for drugs, including AARP, discount pharmacies, and big box retailers such as Walmart.

Myth #3: Americans Spend Too Much on Prescription Drugs

If you examine each dollar spent on drugs versus a dollar spent on other remedies and rate them against their ability to keep you healthy, drugs offer tremendous return on your investment.  Prescription drugs often suppress or prevent the need for expensive health care procedures in the future.

Myth #4: Pharmacists can be replaced by machines

Pharmacists do so much more that count pills from a big bottle and drop them into a little bottle.  Pharmacists check to make sure that the drug will not have an adverse, perhaps life-threatening reaction with the patient.   The pharmacist additionally can offer advise on how to take the medication and can answer any pressing questions the patient might have.

Myth #5: Generic Drugs Are Dangerous

Myth #6: Generic drugs ingredients differ from the brand name by up to 45 percent

Myth #7: Patients who start with a brand drug and switch to a generic risk harming themselves

Myth #8: Generic drugs cost less, which means they aren’t as effective

The Food and Drug Administration utilizes meticulous standards when it approves a generic drug for release into the market.  The drug is tested for strength, quality, purity, and potency.  While very small variations over millions of doses, both generic and brand name drugs have gone through years of testing and development to ensure they are safe and effective.

Myth #9: The federal government pushes generic drugs on Americans to save healthcare costs.

This could not be farther from the truth.

There exist many online resources that can be of immense value to individuals looking for knowledge on medicine. A lot many resources offer scholarly information from reputed journals, but for a fee. Here we discuss 11 ways to gain information and find out about medicine for free.

1. MedicineNet.com is a respectable portal for information on healthcare and medicine. You can search their ever-growing database for information on almost anything related to medicine.

2. The Google directory is a neatly arranged directory of medicine-related sites. You can start from the listings page and dig deeper till you find the site listings, from here you can move on to the site of your choice; or you can use the search facility to look up results for keywords entered.

3. There are portals such as Free Books for Doctors that do a great job of presenting free reference books of high quality for all. Online Books for Free is another such site. A simple search on Google will throw up similar sites that you download free ebooks on different medical subjects.

4. As far as portals on medicines are concerned, eMedicine is up there with the best of them. The evidence-based content is updated by more than 8,000 knowledgeable authors that cover amongst other things the latest practical guidelines in 38 clinical areas. You can access 28,000 multimedia files for a better understanding of issues on 6,500 disease-related topics. The articles are peer-reviewed so that the content that finally reaches you is accurate and of high quality.

5. The National Library of Medicine is the world’s largest library on medicine and its website is equally exhaustive. If you wish to research a subject on medicine, this is the place to begin your search. Ideal information resource for researchers, students, librarians, and publishers.

6. There are many portals online that offer free access to prestigious medical journals from around the world free of cost for a limited period. Still others will let you browse through abstracts which in itself are useful for staying abreast of cutting-edge information on medicine-related subjects.

7. If it is information on clinical trials that you are looking for, then head to ClinicalTrials.gov, which is a huge repository of federally and privately supported clinical trials being conducted all over the world. If you wish to learn about advances in medicine related to a particular illness you can look up information on the basis of condition, drug intervention, sponsor, and location.

8. Google, the big daddy of all search engines, can offer remarkably refined search results. Google Scholar and Google Research are good places to look up medicine-related information. Even the standard Google search will throw up authority information; you can restrict the search to .edu and .gov domains if information from these domains is of special interest to you.

9. Healthline positions itself as a portal for people conscious about their health and well-being and stresses contextually relevant information for those seeking knowledge on medicine. You can look up more than 250,000 concepts that include diseases, conditions, causes, symptoms, and more. The search function on this site is a handy tool to look up contextual information on health and medicine.

10. There are many online medical dictionaries that can serve as the starting step for your search on medicine.

11. If, alternative medicine is what you’re interested in then there are many resources out there that actually offer not just free information but also free courses in alternative medicine and therapies.