In today’s world, it is often more convenient to look online for any purchase we want to make. This gives us access to more companies and better pricing than a visit to our local stores could ever allow. The same is true when looking for cheap medications, but the requirement to get a prescription could be holding you back.
If you are looking to buy prescription meds, there are many websites offering better buying options. Online pharmacies can offer massive discounts over your local prices, but are these safe choices? We take a look at how you can buy medication without a prescription and make sure you get pills that are safe.
Contents
Reasons for Prescriptions
Prescriptions can be a hassle, the requirement for a doctor’s appointment to get a prescription can be inconvenient and time-consuming. You may wonder, why you can’t just buy without prescription? There are, however, some very good reasons why you should have a valid prescription when ordering meds online.
Some drugs can be addictive and need to be prescribed to avoid abuse and stop people from falling into a spiral of addiction. Despite this, many people have become addicted to pain medication in the US in recent years. The opioid crisis in the US has led to horrifying results. Over 130 people die every day in the US from opioid overdoses.
Some people then find that they end up moving on to heroin to stave off the withdrawal symptoms which they risk having to experience. The drug fentanyl is another option, but one which leads to many overdoses. It is far too easy to overdose with just a tiny amount of fentanyl leading to a life-threatening situation.
This whole situation began in the US thanks to the big pharmaceutical manufacturers convincing doctors that the opioid pain killers which they offered weren’t actually addictive. This may have been a genuine mistake or it could have been motivated by profits, ignoring the consequences down the line and the devastation inflicted on people’s lives. This started in the 1990s, with the full effects only being seen years later.
This shows that even when a prescription is required, it can still have disastrous effects on people’s lives.
There is also the problem of when medications have adverse effects on the patient. Sometimes pills can react with other drugs the patient in taking or they can be unsuitable for someone with other underlying conditions. For example, the popular men’s health drugs can increase the heart rate and cause problems for men with a heart condition. If you had such a condition and took the men’s health drugs anyway, you could end up having a cardiac arrest.
Getting a Prescription Online
Telemedicine services allow customers to have an online consultation with a doctor and get a valid prescription for the treatment they want. This consultation can occur in a few different ways:
- Online questionnaire
- Video chat
- Messaging
The consultation will often combine some of these methods as appropriate. They might start with an online questionnaire and then switch to email communication if the doctor needs more information about some of the answers you gave.
Some online pharmacies will a questionnaire and a messaging system through an app that they offer. This can make it easier to answer any questions you may have with the doctor handling your case.
Whatever system an online pharmacy uses, they are limited to the pills they are able to prescribe to customers. The reasons for this are down to the regulations which the pharmacy site is operating under. Telemedicine services are mostly restricted to European and North America countries which tend to have stronger prescription requirements, but the service is starting to spread to other countries.
Normally, you will be dealing with a doctor in your own country or state and these services are regulated in a similar way to normal doctor services. This means that you aren’t guaranteed to get the prescription you want, but will usually get a refund if you have had to pay directly for the consultation.
Sometimes these consultations are included in the price of your treatment or require an additional upfront cost. Either way, it isn’t going to be a free service, with the cost of the doctors time added to the purchase price of treatments when it might appear to be free. You can go through a pharmacy which offers this service or find an independent telemedicine consultation supplier.
Treatments which are able to be prescribed through telemedicine are normally restricted to the following areas:
- Hair loss
- Weight loss
- Skin care
- Stopping smoking
- Allergies
- Men’s health
This does limit the scope of such telemedicine services and means that it may not be suitable for a lot of potential customers. This is an area which is growing and expanding all the time, thanks to the convenience it offers and the cost savings available.
Alternative Medication
If you want to buy a prescription medication but you don’t have a prescription, there are some alternatives. Perhaps some herbal or food supplement treatments will provide the results you are looking for. While they may not be as well known as brand name medication, many food supplements seem to produce results which customers are very happy with. In many cases, the results seem to be on a par with the outcomes found from the popular brand name pills.
Supplements don’t require a prescription and can easily be ordered online. Don’t take the company’s word for it that the pills work though, you should check out what other customers are saying. They will probably have customer testimonials on their sales page and these will, of course, be very positive towards the pills. However, you shouldn’t take the word of these testimonials as they are never going to post negative comments here. Try to find customer feedback on an independent site to give you an unbiased opinion.
There may even be alternatives from big pharma which you might not have considered. Pfizer, for example, the manufacturer of the famous men’s health blue pill, now offer a product in some regions known as Connect. This pill offers similar effects but without the requirement for a prescription.
If you don’t want to go to the trouble of getting a prescription it pays to expand your options and you may find something just as effective without the doctor’s visit. This will all depend on what type of medication you are looking for, however, but it doesn’t hurt to investigate to see if there are other choices.
Prescription Regulations
When shopping for meds online the prescription requirement will differ depending on the pills you want to buy and where you are located. While the rules are broadly similar for most countries, there can be differences, big differences, between many countries for what their laws mandate regarding prescriptions.
Some countries may not need a prescription for a particular pill, while another deems it to be essential for the safe administering of that medicine. In theory, at least, you could go to a website in another country and get pills without a prescription.
No Prescription Online Pharmacies
There is the option of going to one of the many online pharmacies which will sell drugs without any prescription. There are a lot of pharmacies which offer this but many of them are scams. While they may seem to offer great savings on medicine, they could end up costing you much more in the long run.
First and foremost, there is a big potential risk here. If a pharmacy is happy to sell drugs without a prescription it could indicate that they are willing to break the rules in other ways too.
Dealing with a company which is happy to ignore the regulations could result in you finding yourself with pills which aren’t of a high-quality or even fake. While you might feel happy that the meds aren’t going to cause you problems because you have taken them before, you may discover that the pills don’t contain the correct active ingredients in the right amounts.
This can leave you, rather than helping with your medical condition, actually creating health problems. Fake pills are a real problem when looking for cheap medications online and this shouldn’t be ignored.
Conclusion
As we have shown, there are quite a few choices open to someone without a prescription when ordering meds online. What your eventual choice will be could largely be down to the type of medication you are looking to buy. The safest of the choices we have outlined is online doctor consultation. The telemedicine option isn’t going to be the cheapest choice, however, and is also limited in which treatments are available.
The other options may not be quite as safe as the doctor’s consultation but they could give you access to pills which you wouldn’t otherwise be able to get. When looking to buy without a prescription, make your choice carefully and pay the price to get the treatment you want as safely as possible.
