Canadian pharmacies are doling out prescriptions like never before. While they are serving a huge domestic market, they are also catering to customers in the US. These pharmacies operating out of Canada are filling out prescriptions for everything from common cold to controlling blood pressure.
It
is understood that they can read prescriptions given out by Canadian
doctors for Canadian patients but what about the patients across the
border residing in the USA? In many cases, a Canadian doctor rewrites
the prescription given out by his US counterpart so as to make the
whole process of filing out process legal. In case of unlicensed
pharmacies, no one bothers as, prescriptions are not needed just name
the drug and they will ship it across to you. Negligence of some of the
basic business ethics by certain firms has led to these pharmacies
coming under the scanner of authorities both in the US and Canada.
In the US, fears have been raised over the risk to patients from sale
of counterfeit drugs. These drugs may contain inert components, which
can cause significant harm to the body of the consumer. In some cases
it has been found legitimate drugs well past their expiry date were
diverted to illegitimate retailers for sale across the internet. Cases
of improperly manufactured drugs have also come to light.
According to the Canadian Medical Association, physicians should
necessarily conduct a physical exam and discuss the merits and risks
associated with consumption of a particular drug before it is
prescribed. However, in case of many Canadian pharmacies this was not
found to be the case. This was also facilitated by desperate patients
in the United States who were willing to buy anything offered cheap for
various ailments without being bothered about its side effects.
Some Canadian pharmacies have however, implemented many measures to
gain trust of the customer based in US. Most notable among them is
arranging for a visit by a Canada based physician to the patient in US
for examining him before filling out a prescription. All this is
happening while the business for Canadian firms is growing by leaps and
bounds. Canadian firms are now filling out prescriptions like never
before. Some firms have claimed to have filled as much as 3000
prescriptions a day indicating the volume of business catered to by
these pharmacies.
So irrespective of the some of the measures being planned to regulate
these pharmacies, it only seems that these firms will continue witness
healthy growth rates.