Prescription Medications

[Russ]

How do you deal with refilling prescripiton medication refills??? I think having them sent to an foreign country by an on-line pharmacy or a service like St Brendan's I belive becomes a customs/legal problem. Advice please??? russ

[Hud3]

Hi, Russ.

Our U.S. prescription drug provider can't or won't ship overseas, so I have them mail our prescriptions to our PMB at St. Brendan's Isle, who then forwards them to us here on Nevis. They have to be examined by customs before being released to us, but we've never been charged customs duties on prescription drugs.

The folks at St. Brendan's Isle are very knowledgeable about this sort of thing, and will attach a customs form to the outside of the package when necessary. I've never had any problems with shipments of any sort through them.

[maxingout]

Prescriptions are not an issue many places in the third world. I just go into the pharmacy and tell them what I want without a prescription and it miraculously appears. The medications are also much less expensive.

[AnchorageGuy]

We too usually just but what we need at a pharmacy in other countries without prescriptions and in over 16 years have never had a problem and yes we have heard all of the arguments over quality and counterfeiting but we have not encountered any of this. The cost is usually 1/3 or less the US prices.

[San Juan Sailor]

Reguarding pharmaceuticals,
My doctor told me that the government recently finished a study of prescription drugs and that the vast majority of them are prefectly good after 14 years! The drug companies insist on the 1 year expiration date because they'll make a lot more money.

[Zanshin]

San Juan - that is not quite true regarding the pharma companies. The various governments require stability tests, where the drugs are stored for a given period of time (i.e. 1 or 2 years) in the type of conditions that might be expected - usually with a lot of temperature and humidity variations. After this storage period they are analyzed for physical and chemical deterioration. If no deterioration has occurred then they get approved for a shelf life of however long they were tested for, this is done by a national regulatory agency such as the FDA. So even though the manufacturer knows from their own tests that the drug might have a real shelf life of over 10 years they cannot label the product with any expiration date other than what the government mandates. For this reason you will see various shelf lifes for the same product in different countries. Many countries even require their own stability tests and won't recognize any tests done overseas - Japan being a typical example. In Japan they require that all foreign pharmaceuticals be re-tested prior to be approved for use in the Japanese marketplace. Even such products as Aspirin had to go through this expensive and time-consuming process.

[RickD]

Some of us can't buy a 14 year supply of medications we require though, lol. The fact that our insurance companies would frown on that might be a problem as well!