Buying Thyroid and Hormone Medication

[Maryh1]

I've noticed that many people on this site have problems buying NatureThroid and cytomel/Liothyronine. I may be nieve, but If you were to get a prescription from your doctor and have them call it or text it in to a Walmart pharmacy or a compounding pharmacy (which is very expensive) I think they would fill it and send it to you. Belmar Pharmacy in Lakewood CO sends me my prescription. I have never set foot in the store. It is suppose to be one of the best in the Denver area. There would probably be an extra charge to send it out of the country.

[puncturedbicycle]

I assume we are getting our wires crossed. Most of us are in the UK and it doesn't work that way here. We are unable to get prescriptions from both nhs and private practitioners for a start, and sometimes it is difficult to find a pharmacy who can fill the script.

Are you suggesting we get our doctors to text Walmart in the US to send our meds to the UK? You need a UK prescriber for a UK prescription and, as far as I'm aware, a US prescriber for a US prescription, and even if that was not the case the postage and customs costs would be prohibitive.

[Maryh1 in reply to puncturedbicycle]

I don't know how it works in the UK, it was just a thought.

[JS33 in reply to Maryh1]

In the UK the NHS believes in giving hypothyroid patients as little of any medication as possible , especially anything that works. And the less blood tests they have that actually show any hormone levels , the easier it is to convince them they pay their taxes for a ''health '' service , while really lining the pockets of private interests.

[Maryh1 in reply to JS33]

That sounds very frustrating. As you probably know we complain bitterly about the price of insurance and medical care and look to countries that have socialized medicine and wish we could have a similar plan.

Could you go to France and perhaps get travel insurance and be treated there?

[JS33 in reply to Maryh1]

A lot self treat , private blood tests , private non - prescription NDT . The NHS isn't too bad in some areas , though underfunded, but in the thyroid department , i think there's some corporate politics involved in what is allowed to be scientific truth.

[gabkad in reply to Maryh1]

JS33 is referring to 'standard of care'. It's a government mandated rule book for physicians. We have it here in Canada as well except we don't have this prescription business on government healthcare so it's not as bad. Only people who are disabled or over age 65 get government paid for medication and then stuff like T3 is not covered. The cheapest options are what the government will pay for even these do not work for a person. T3 is not as expensive here as it is in the UK but it's definitely orders of magnitude more expensive than Levothyroxine which is dirt cheap.

[puncturedbicycle in reply to Maryh1]

Maryh1 travel insurance is for emergencies, you can't use it for a chronic condition that you already knew you had. Even if you were diagnosed abroad the usual approach to non-life-threatening issues is to stablise your condition and to complete treatment when you get home.

I had to fight to get a root canal treatment covered while abroad. On the other hand I was able to get a diagnostic mammogram while I was away and had breast pain, so I guess it depends.

[puncturedbicycle in reply to JS33]

JS33 to be fair a lot of Americans have this problem as well, it can be a struggle to find a good doctor who won't spend all their time trying to reduce your meds.

My mum's last doctor refused to do t3 testing even though she was taking t3 and he was always on a quest to reduce her Armour (he couldn't get her off it entirely, she said she didn't want levo). This is someone who participates in one of these concierge-style services (you pay a yearly fee of around £1500 for quick and easy access to your doctor) so not someone off a bus shelter ad.

[Maryh1 in reply to puncturedbicycle]

US doctors have been bought and paid for by the insurance and the pharmaceutical companies who want them to sell their products, discounting any product that they don't produce like bio identical hormones and certain thyroid medication. The goal is to eliminate the competition at all cost.

Our insurance costs for the average family is as high as their house payments. Doctors are being educated by the pharmaceutical salesmen. Doctors can make enough money going along with the old bad ideas that they have nothing to motivate them to move into the 21st century. Plus, the lobbies for both are so powerful nothing ever changes.

The paperwork an average doctor has to put up with because of the insurance companies cause some doctors to leave the field or become concierge doctors that only a few can afford.

I could go on and on.

Lucky me I'm a senior and don't get charged like my children, but there's a real possibility this will be taken away by the current administration.

[puncturedbicycle in reply to Maryh1]

Yes, many of us are familiar w the US system.

I do not know of a doctor who has left the field due to insurance paperwork but I do know doctors who just don't take insurance (or Medicare/Medicaid) anymore, or, even easier, they require the patient to submit the paperwork.

I wouldn't say that doctors are the real bad guys in this scenario. They take on enormous debt to get through med school and have to pay for their own malpractice insurance which can be prohibitive (why obstetrics is no longer an appealing speciality). The litigious culture does not help. Just like the house always wins in Vegas, insurance always wins. They make the rules so they never make a rule they will not benefit from.

I know Americans who have had the best health care money can buy at rock bottom prices because they had excellent benefits that carried on after retirement, but that well is now dry and we'll never see anything like it again.

In Europe the culture is different, the problems are different, but I couldn't say who is better off. My health care is as they say 'free at the point of delivery' but it doesn't do much good for my chronic condition. And for all the efforts to keep the costs down, that well is nearly dry too.

[Maryh1 in reply to puncturedbicycle]

Punctured Tire,

You sound very knowledgeable, were you ever in the medical profession?

I use to sail with a group of ladies in Florida. Most of their husbands were doctors. About 10 of them retired early because they hated the demands of the insurance companies and the large staff they had to employ to do the paper work . That was over 10 years ago so that's probably changed.

I don't know what I would do if I couldn't get the medication and lab tests I need. Maybe socialized medicine is not the answer, although in some countries it seems to be working. What do you think is the answer?

[puncturedbicycle in reply to Maryh1]

Lol, early retirement for a doctor is probably a pretty nice option, I thought you meant they changed jobs entirely, went to work at Starbucks or something (jk). I wonder when it became acceptable to just say, 'We don't submit paperwork, you have to do that yourself.' Maybe that wasn't an option when your friends' husbands were working.

I feel like Canada seem to get it right and a lot of Canadians seem to think so. It's hard to know. If only I had the answer.

We become so tolerant of the weaknesses of the system we're familiar with, and we become protective of it because it's the devil we know. I know loads of people who crow about how wonderful the nhs is (parts of it are of course), but it is hard to have a balanced conversation as any critique is taken as support for privatisation.

[Clutter]

Maryh1,

Many of the requests are from members whose doctors won't write prescriptions for NDT or T3 so they are asking where to source them without prescription.