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Drug shortage: pharmacists and general practitioners advise against "drugs

2022-12-19T18:59:23.953Z


If medicines are no longer available in the pharmacy, could the well-stocked medicine chest of the neighbors be the salvation? A bad idea, find general practitioners and pharmacists.


In neighborhood forums, everything that is no longer needed is exchanged and given away: plant cuttings, unused crockery, clothing that no longer fits.

Why not open packs of medication that are no longer needed?

More than 300 medicines are currently not available in Germany.

The President of the German Medical Association, Klaus Reinhardt, brought up the idea of ​​helping each other out of the pharmacy: "We need something like flea markets for medicines in the neighborhood."

Monica Ganster

Editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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The President of the Hessen State Chamber of Pharmacists, Ursula Funke, gives clear advice on this: "Don't touch it!" She considers an exchange in the neighborhood to be irresponsible from a health care perspective.

Because side effects and drug interactions can vary between patients.

"A drug that is ideal for your girlfriend can sometimes harm you," warns Funke.

Other important points relate to the shelf life and storage of the medicinal products.

If the shelf life has expired, pharmaceutical companies are no longer liable, and effectiveness and tolerability can no longer be guaranteed, according to Funke.

Storage is also crucial: "Active ingredients can decompose if a medicine that is to be stored cool is not kept in the refrigerator or if a light-sensitive preparation is not protected from light," explains Funke.

So you can never know for sure what condition a preparation left by a neighbor is in.

No fever juice anywhere

The Wiesbaden family doctor Christian Sommerbrodt struggles every day with the consequences of the lack of medicines in his practice, but also considers a “flea market” for medicines to be the wrong approach.

Not even doctors are allowed to pass on medicines that have already been used, he says, and even the supply of free samples to patients has been significantly reduced in recent years.

Medicines that are not available are currently worrying many parents, because fever syrup for small children is almost impossible to find.

"Then only the second or third best solution remains," says Sommerbrodt, "but that's not the therapy we want to offer."

In this specific case, this means that parents may have to resort to home remedies such as calf wraps to lower the temperature of the little ones.

In an emergency, however, paediatricians also have to refer young patients to the clinic if nothing else helps – for illnesses that could actually be treated well on an outpatient basis.

This places an additional burden on hospitals.

Important heart drug is missing

The lack of fever syrup for children is only the tip of the iceberg, the shortage also affects other, very special medicines.

Sommerbrodt, who is also on the board of the Hesse Association of General Practitioners, mentions Digitoxin, for example, whose active ingredient is extracted from the leaves of the foxglove.

It is prescribed for cardiac insufficiency, when a "pumping weakness" of the organ is to be compensated.

While there are substitute preparations for many things, this is not the case with Digitoxin.

"Adjusting the dose is difficult, you need laboratory values ​​for that," says the doctor.

"Every day we have a number of patients who either didn't get their medication at all or didn't get the prescribed pack size in their pharmacy and then come back to us for registration because they need a new prescription".

The rustic solution to the problem of taking the prescribed 50 tablets from a pack of 100 and handing them to the patient over the pharmacy counter is usually only given to well-known regular customers who have been using a preparation for a long time.

Theoretically, the pharmacies could call the prescribing doctor and consult them, but Sommerbrodt brushes them off: "They wouldn't get through to us at all.

I estimate that we can only answer a quarter of all calls at the moment.” Therefore, a lot of footwork is necessary to get certain medicines in the first place.

Because even a quick call to pharmacies to ask whether this or that product is in stock is not always successful.

If the customers are queuing in the sales room, a caller has to wait a long time - if he is successful at all.

If Sommerbrodt could wish for something, it would be a digital inventory of all medicines in Germany, which would ideally be ready for immediate use.

This does not mean the wholesaler, but the stocks of the individual pharmacies.

Then every pharmacist could see which colleague still has a certain drug in stock that can no longer be ordered nationwide.

Because many pharmacies have their own stocks of medicines, says the doctor, it is sometimes worthwhile for his patients to visit several branches in order to finally get a medicine that cannot be delivered.

Source: faz

All news articles on 2022-12-19

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