By Loretta Humble/Around the Town
I have two pieces of medical advice for you this week. The first one is this: Trust your home town pharmacy to do you right. Don’t be so sure the big chain pharmacies can do as well.
I still don’t understand why or how this happened, but this is what I experienced this weekend:
Someone who has no money, that I’ve been trying to help, got his hand hurt and it got infected. Even though I paid for him to go to ETMC’s Emergency Clinic, it continued to get worse. Sunday he had to go back to the real emergency room. They lanced it for the second time, and gave him a prescription for some powerful antibiotics and pain medicine. I was out of town. All the regular pharmacies were closed except one of those big pharmacies, and they were about to close. He called me, and I called somebody back home, and asked them to call to find out what the prescriptions would cost and loan him the money. She was told it would be $32, so she loaned him that. When he got to the store, they told him the antibiotic was $92 and the pain meds $8. He didn’t have the money for the antibiotics and they couldn’t sell him the pain medicine alone. By the time I tried to call with my credit card numbers they had closed. So he had to go without the meds all night.
Monday morning I took the same prescriptions to Malakoff Pharmacy and asked for their advice. They sold me the two medications for $32. I believe they reduced the cost somewhat by selling him pills of a different size, so that he has to take two instead of one to get the prescribed dosage.
When I went back to the big store, I didn’t get to speak to a pharmacist, but I did speak to the manager and a pharmacy technician in the store. She said they could have changed the size of the antibiotic pills and sold it to him for $57. But they didn’t offer that. But of course he didn’t have $57 either.
The manager didn’t know what happened but was sincerely troubled by it, and was going to look into it.
I’m not saying the big store is bad. I don’t know what the problem was. Maybe they did the best they could. I’m just telling you what happened to me this weekend. And saying trust your local store more.
My other piece of medical advice is for those people who are having knee trouble and are considering surgery.
There is an alternative to knee surgery that works for many people.
I just got started on mine today. I now have a super-duper Bionicare knee brace. Not only is it already cutting down on my arthritis pain, there is a strong possibility it will help my knee to heal. It has been shown to help 67 percent of the folks who used it to avoid surgery. It is covered by Medicare, and I’m told Medicare is considering requiring folks to try this before they undergo surgery. I have been looking for and trying out alternate cures for my bad knee for some years now, but I had never heard about this brace until I gave up and went to an orthopedist to get my knee replaced. Instead he signed me up for this program. He told me he doesn’t even do knee surgery any more. He says there is a place for surgery, but he gets such good results with this program, he leaves the surgery for others.
I’ll bet there will be one or two of you out there who might want to look into it. Ask your orthopedist or check it out at www.vqorthocare.com.
So I guess my column this week is a big commercial for Malakoff Pharmacy and VQ Orthocare. But I think they both deserve it, and you deserve to hear about them.