Hanningfield Pages

Monday, 12 April 2010

Are you getting the medicine you should be?

Would you ever notice if you were given ‘cheap’ medicine instead of the one you actually thought you were getting?

Well it does happen, some chemists will give you ‘cheaper made’ tablets instead of the ones that are more expensive to make.

One lady inparticular had noticed and decided to ask her pharmacist why.

Susan Robinson explains that she has epilepsy and something started to go wrong. ‘I began to have a lot more fits, as many as two a week instead of one every one or two months.

‘It was really scary - I never knew when it was going to happen,’ she says.

‘I developed epilepsy late - in my early 50s - and am still coming to terms with it.

‘But just when it was starting to become manageable, I was tipped back into the state I’d been in when it all started,’ says Mrs Robinson.

She took a closer look at the packaging of her prescription. ‘It looked different to the others I’d had. It had Portuguese writing and was called Topamac.

‘The pharmacist said he had substituted it for my regular brand-name drug to save money.’

It is done to save money, but what if it makes people’s health deteriorate?

If you think that your prescription is not what you think it should be then contact your pharmacist or speak to someone inside thepharmaceutical industry where you received it from.