An examination of selected drug availability at online pharmacies

Abstract

According to the literature, prescription cost and convenience are generally regarded as the most important reasons for buying online. This study examines the availability of selected prescription drugs at some of the online pharmacies in the USA. Specifically, the drugs examined are among the ten most often prescribed by physicians.

Quality of Online Pharmacies and Websites Selling Prescription Drugs: A Systematic Review

“…The remaining 42 articles [10,14,27,57-95] dealing with online pharmacy characteristics are listed in Table 1, which shows the first author, year of publication, and the main features studied; due to the descriptive nature of the data it was not possible to report numerically all the results presented in the following subsections. When the numeric percentages of presence of the item were available, they are given in the table; the letter X means it was not possible to include data in the table or compare them (when, for instance, the groups they refer to are different and hence not comparable).…”

“…Samples were obtained using a variety of methods, the most frequent being to look for online pharmacies using online search engines via various keywords. Some researchers used different sample selection methods: one found websites from received spam [74], while others looked for the websites indicated by other sources, such as the first one listed in the Best Online Pharmacy guide by epharmacyfinder.com [14], or the VIPPS list [59,76], the Pharmacychecker.com list [89], or the Top 100 Retailer [77]. …”

“…Some online pharmacy samples were specifically selected to have only websites not asking for a prescription from the customer’s physician [57,67-70, 82,93]. In the samples that did not use prescription as a criterion for inclusion or exclusion, the prescription requirement varied widely: all websites asked for an original medical prescription in Wagner et al [95] (who selected only US-based online pharmacies), more than half did so in other samples [60,72,87], less than half [10,58,63,65,66,71,73,75,80,84,86,90] in still others, and none in a few [74,83,91]. In Bloom and Iannacone [61,62] it was not possible to determine whether the required prescription was an original one by the customer’s physician or replaced by an online health evaluation as explained below.…”

“…In 2003 Arruanda [58] found that their sample was equally divided into 3 groups: selling 1 drug only, between 2 and 29 drugs (average 7), and selling 30 or more. The various studies reported several specific drug offers: sildenafil [59,60,80,84,86,87], benzodiazepines [84,86,87], painkillers [80,84,88], antibiotics [87,88], insulin [87,88], female hormones [87,88], antidepressants [80,84,86], alopecia medications [14,27,80], and obesity medications [59,80]. Bloom and Iannacone [62] reported that 160 separate medications were offered in their sample, which gives an idea of how widely differentiated the drug offer is.…”

Pills, pluralism, risk and citizenship: Theorising e-pharmacies

“…In 2002, global sales of online drugs were projected at $192.2 billion; by 2004, this figure had rise to $370 billion (Koong et al, 2005) and presently there are an estimated 457-3000 online pharmacies in operation . Obtaining accurate data about the number of e-pharmacies and their commercial value is challenging because many of these organisations are illegal, transient and secretive, thus making them difficult to monitor and regulate (Gernburd and Jadad, 2007).…”