I'd like to raise an issue with the current stopgap procedure of making all patients prescribed pain medications physically pick up their paper prescriptions from their doctor's office monthly.
First, this implies that all who are prescribed these drugs by their doctors are misusing them. This is simply not the case.
These drugs have a purpose, and most patients who use them - or at least those who are in enough pain to need a regimen of some type of relief - don't like the effects of too much of the drug. (Living life asleep? No, thank you.) They prefer to take them as prescribed and to function, which the prescribed medication allows them to do.
Second: The prescription can be picked up or mailed. What? The nurse at my doctor's office said they took no liability for the prescription after it goes into the mailbox and would not redo a lost prescription. So it's okay to send a prescription through the mail at the risk of it simply being lifted out of a mailbox or whatever but it's not okay to transmit the prescription from a doctor's office directly to the pharmacy? The safest possible method? That policy makes no sense whatsoever.
Thank you, Jeebus! And thank you, Wendy M. Levy [“A union-busting law firm separates Co-op from its expressed ideals,” Letters, Oct. 17], for your articulation of the problem.
Today is another day I was woken up by not one construction project but two using jackhammers and this horrible, awful machine that's injecting cement into the foundation of our building. I woke up with chest pains and I could not breathe. I had a dream that I had...