PSA: Fire Your Pharmacy and Find One That Respects and Takes Care of You
K, so I see posts wayyyy to often where the OP is crying and miserable about the way their pharmacy treats them like shit and never is on top of making sure they have your meds available and/or ready for you come refill day.
If this is ever the case, you need to fire your pharmacy and find a better one. Usually, smaller mom+pop or smaller local chains will appreciate your business and help you ideally with these things without you even having to ask (or only requiring one-time orientation on what your preferences are as they relate to servics they usually do or should be offering:
fill your meds automatically without you having to ask
ensuring it is in stock without you having to worry in order for them to fill said refills
advise you of any complications or further steps required of you to help them make sure you're taken care of and consistent with refills
remind YOU about shit, not the other way around. My pharmacy might as well be my unpaid intern/executive assistant with all things medical as they pertain to my business/the privelege of getting said business I grant them
delivery: this is non-negotiable. If they ain't delivering, I ain't playin'. My pharmacy knows that to be my drug dealer, they gotta come to me. Cuz I ain't leaving the couch to get my drugs
deal with dr for you if any discrepancy or error is in the way. This is the beauty of medical practices with adjoining pharms. Ethics be damned, vertical/horizontal integration 4 the win!
That is all. Your pharmacy should feel so lucky to have a good get like AD(H)D patients, I would rather have that then a money printer if I was a pharmacy owner.
Spread the word and f all that noise. You are worthy to be waited on and catered to, controlled substance or otherwise.
Not sure if this is cogent but I take rhe 2nd rarest (prescribed/available) medication next to Desoxyn and I've never had an issue getting it filled, even in the depths of the Great Adderall Shortage although it wasn't Adderall so not sure how relevant my n=1 is this context
To my knowledge, you cannot get stimulants delivered, and I have to call in every month for them to get filled. I’m not sure if the latter could be taken care of by the pharmacy. I have Costco pharmacy, and I really like them.
Edit: Please see the comment below, apparently you can get stimulants through mail if you use a mail-in pharmacy. So please check with your doctor/pharmacy regarding this.
The WebMD article does indicate that the specifics vary by state, but it sounds to me that delivery of a 1 month supply is legal in all 50 states.
Because they’re schedule II drugs, you may not be able to get a bulk delivery. State regulations on prescribing these types of medications vary, so you may be able to get only a month’s worth of your ADHD medication at a time and need a new prescription for each refill. Some states also require an electronic prescription be submitted by the doctor.
Yeah, it's been super awesome, and I've never run into any shortages. I'm with Kaiser and they really push their patients to use their pharmacy, so I have a suspicion that's not the case for you. I've heard that many insurance companies have a preferred mail order pharmacy, so you might want to dig around with your insurance company to see if they have a preferred partner. If that doesn't work out, searching "mail order adderall" seems to turn up some possibilities, but I can't vouch for any of them. Your prescribing doctor may also have suggestions.
Got it, yeah, Kaiser is a different beast, but I'll see if I can do anything on my end. My insurance's preferred pharmacy is CVS, and I stopped using them cause they never had any Adderall during the shortage.
Oh thank you, I appreciate it. I'm able to get my doctor visits be virtual, and he is allowed to prescribe 3 months at a time, so I have to see him every 3 months. I remember when I had to go in. It would be nice to get the meds delivered, I'm just worried about the shortage, but I hear it's getting better.
Oh yeah, I imagine it would be monthly. I don't mind going to my pharmacy because i shop at Costco anyway, and they provide great service. But it would be nice to just "set it and forget it" with a mail0in prescription.
State law, but also your insurance and pharmacy benefit manager. Our pbm only allows 30 days of any Rx (pain in the ass for "round the clock" birth control) and the thing is we can pay cash and get more, but this is so hard to communicate to the pharmacies, like literally every time they just fill the 30 days and you're arguing with some poor tech holding up the line
I emigrated from the US to Canada and I was fucking amazed when my GP wrote a script for 90 days of methylphenidate... and just recently I has a three month out-of-country remote working gig and Canada was totally fine giving me a 120 day supply of my meds in advance for travel. Also, without extended insurance, my meds cost me 10$ for 30 days up here.
It's so fucking nice not living under the US Healthcare system.
Yeah, was a bit of a culture shock going the other direction. I literally didn’t go to a hospital with a broken ankle because I was uninsured. Wrapped it tight, stayed off of it, and luckily it seems to have healed properly on its own.
That happened with me one time where I went to a pharmacy in a grocery store with 3 previous months' bottles and he just wrote me a script for 180 filled right there.
I won't get into it but suffice it to say that was a weird 2 months ;) life was much harder and more perilous back then...
Edit: also like the biggest horse pill-bottle I've ever seen or retained possession of
I never understand these downvotes, actualky starting to get amused I have a couple hanger-onners ;)
Try out the ~~ ~~ strike-thru, its fun aha. I use it all the time for both serious corrections and also comedically its a goldmine to show your thinking process lol
I mean it would never scale for Costco I don't think. Smaller pharms hire a random guy who Ubers your drugs to you. Its an unimaginably beautiful thing!
I'm not in US, happily. Its definitely not, pretty sure they wouldn't be taking that risk if it were illegal (I used Über figuratively, its not literally some random Über guy...). We don't have a bunch of dumb, narc cops setting drug policy over here :)
I don't understand some of the "no it doesn't exist/its ILLEGAL" "folks" (if they're not bots or something. They speak so confidently and so easy to debunk...
There absolutely is. I get my vyvanse prescription delivered every month in Minnesota. And I got my Adderall prescription delivered the same way before the shortage cased me to switch. Lookup a pharmacy called Capsule, they're delivery only.
K, I don't think you know that, you seem to be parroting the top-level commenter who already admitted explicitly he needed to actually look into it further as opposed to just saying things or how he "feels" it is. Even his initial comment sort of subtly caveats he didn't know 100%