Steve Anthony: True Canadian Pharmacy

When the blockbuster heart pill Norvasc lost its patent protection earlier this year, generic manufacturers couldn’t wait to get into the lucrative market for Canada’s third top-selling prescription drug, predicting they could save patients $180-million a year with their cheaper copies.
But the Saskatchewan government has just awarded its first contract for a generic version of the medicine to a generic branch of Pfizer, the pharmaceutical giant !–more– that makes Norvasc itself, feeding concerns that such tendering systems will become the norm and inadvertently leave Canadians paying much more for prescription drugs.
Pfizer lost a drawn-out court battle recently to try to keep its patent-protection in force longer and delay any generic competition for another year.
Like other brand-name companies, though, the world’s largest pharma firm sometimes enters the generic market when its drugs go off patent, and its GenMed division offered Saskatchewan’s drug plan the lowest price among the eight competitors that started selling copies of Norvasc when the patent expired last week.

br /br /canadapharmacynews.com

The Irish Pharmacy Union this evening urged pharmacists to resume normal services immediately #8220;in the interests of patient safety.#8221;
In a statement this evening, the IPU said they were urging members to return to work #8220;in order to prevent a recurrence of the chaotic scenes of yesterday and last week, and in light of commitments made by the Minister in recent statements.#8221;
The union#8217;s executive is holding an emergency !–more– meeting in Dublin this evening to discuss the ongoing dispute.
IPU president Liz Hoctor said some of the issues at stake had not been resolved and warned that further disruption to services was almost inevitable if they were not.

br /br /canadapharmacynews.com

The pharmacist at TOP Food and Drug in suburban Edmonds seemed like an excellent employee.
Friendly and helpful to the customers, he even ran a collection drive, asking people to bring back any unused prescriptions so he could donate the medicine to Third World countries.
Instead, he put much of that medicine back in the pharmacy’s supply - even if its expiration date had passed - thus improving the store’s profits while masking that he was also (more…)

U.S. President Barack Obama’s $3.55-trillion (U.S.) budget included one sentence that could reopen a long simmering debate in Canada - how much access Americans should have to inexpensive medicines from Canada.
For years, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has made it difficult for Americans to import drugs from other countries, including Canada, citing concerns about safety. But that has not stopped many Internet pharmacies from sprouting up (more…)

In this week’s edition of the medical journal The Lancet, Dr. Michael Kochen of the department of general practice at the University of Göttingen in Germany, agreed that patient expectations need to be addressed, since exposure to radiation doses from X-rays or CT scans is an issue. “We need to identify back pain assessment and educational strategies that meet patient expectations and increase satisfaction, while avoiding unnecessary imaging. (more…)

Prostate cancer patients receiving hormone-deprivation therapy often see their tumours grow back within a couple of years, and now some U.S. researchers think they know why.
The scientists, whose study appears in the Jan. 1 issue of Cancer Research, say their finding could lead to a way to track disease progression, as well as new ways to fight prostate cancer.
About 19,000 Canadians are diagnosed with it every year. It is the most common cancer (more…)