The time has finally come that the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) is clamping down on prescription medication refills. Don’t you agree this is long overdue?
Get this, in 2011, about 131 million prescriptions for hydrocodone-containing medications were written for about 47 million patients, according to government estimates. That amounts to about five billion pills. As reported in www.nytimes.com.
The major change is the number of times a prescription can be refilled. Currently patients can refill prescription for six months. Under the new regulations that time-frame will be cut in half to 90 days.
In recent years, the question of whether to tighten prescribing controls over drug medication containing hydrocodone, has been the subject of intense lobbying.
Last year, for example, lobbyists for druggists and chain pharmacies mobilized to derail a measure passed in the Senate that would mandate the types of restrictions that the F.D.A. is now recommending.
At the time, the lobbying arm of the American Cancer Society said that making patients see doctors more often to get prescriptions would impose added burdens and costs on them.
Would you agree that if you are needing chronic pain therapy you should be see your prescribing physician every few months?
I am unsure what the answer is to curb the growing addiction problem our nation has to pain medication, but this seems to me to be a step in the right direction.