Monday, June 02, 2008

A Tip For Vicodin Seekers, Or A Quick Question For Everyone Who Works In A Doctor's Office, Part 2

Dear seemingly everyone who works in a doctor's office in the town where I work,

Why do you phone in a prescription to me and then hand the written original to the patient? WHY? Do you not realize that when you do this you have given them two prescriptions?

The phoned in order is adequate. It meets all legal requirements for the person to obtain what the good doctor has ordered. It has been this way since before I was born.

So does the written prescription. Which means the patient could hang on to that, come get what you ordered from me, then take that written Rx down the street to another pharmacy and get it again. Annoying when it's penicillin. Possibly malpractice when it's Vicodin.

It's one level of dumb to do this once as a mistake. It's stupid on steroids to do it time and time again, after I've told you time and time again it's unnecessary and dangerously incompetent.

Is it a language problem? Because I have technicians who speak Spanish, Tagalog, and Hindi. If it would help, I could have one of them try to get how incredibly ignorant you are through your thick skull and into that tiny brain of yours.

Maybe I should just teach you a lesson. ATTENTION JUNKIES: If you would like to double your pill-seeking productivity, just drop me a line and I'll give you the contact info of the doctors I know who'll insist on giving you two prescriptions when one will do. Twice as many Somas or half the amount of work! The choice will be yours! It'll be like hitting the narcotic mother lode!

Rush Limbaugh is exempt from this offer. He'll have to get his fix the same way he always has.

OK, I'm kidding about spilling the doctor info, but I had you going there for a second, didn't I junkies? I wouldn't be surprised if I still get a couple emails.

And I wouldn't be surprised, Dr. Dumbass, if there isn't already a junkie or two who've figured this out on their own.

Good luck with your malpractice insurance after the DEA investigation. I'm sure the underwriter will give you their best rate.

Love,

Drugmonkey.

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

Gah! There's a couple nurse practitioners that prescribe around here that do the exact same thing. Except they fax us prescriptions (usually on tamper resistant pads, making them completely illegible) and then give the patient the originals to bring in. The patient usually comes in three minutes before we receive the fax, though. The idiocy I see every day never ceases to amaze me.

Nicholas said...

Haha...we have Doctors offices that do that up here too...or else they will fax us an order, and the patient comes in with the duplicate and thinks they're recipts or something.

The majority of junkies arent exactly smart enough to figure out they can utilize two prescriptions...and if they do they usually arent smart enough to go to another pharmacy. Oh woe is us if they stumble upon your blog and these comments!

Jenn Siva said...

man when i saw a new link I thought you were heading to a more professional platform for blogging.

LTYM said...

I just had that happen to me recently with a doctor & thought the same thing.

Anonymous said...

Maybe he isn't blogging in the format you'd prefer because being "professional" doesn't change the mind of The Man and you have vent your frustrations somewhere. You sound like the "professionals" I work with who routinely crush the spirit of others with your corporate bull$hit.

Madeleine said...

Great idea, that getting a double prescription. Now, insurance companies being what they are (cheap tightwads who don't care about humans) how does a junkie afford that second scrip?

Relpax for my migraines is dearly expensive. I found out this morning taht I'm out of luck until my insurance company says I can have more.

DrugMonkey, Master of Pharmacy said...

madeleine,

Most narcotics are relatively cheap. And many junkies long ago learned the "pretend I don't have any insurance" trick.

The smart ones that is. The not-quite-smart-enough ones will do things like get 2 different rx's from 2 different doctors, then try to have them both billed to their insurance. Sometimes I wanna tell them they were sooooooooooo close.....

Anonymous said...

Unfortunately, I realized that the DEA doesn't really give a shit, when we caught a doctor who had been writing for 200 oxycodone 5mg every 15 days for his wife for 7 years. He picked this up every 15 days and paid cash. Then we found out he did the same thing at 7 other pharmacies around town. Then we found out his wife had been dead for those 7 years. Doctor was like 60-70 and only lost his prescribing authority. No other punishment. He had to have been selling that much oxy...

Your irascible pharmacy tech said...

Here in MA we need a hard copy to cover for a phoned in control script. So if a doctors office calls in Vicodin, we either need a hard copy faxed or brought in, so if the patient brings in the hard copy, we throw away the phoned in one.
I had my first Soma junkie last week. I thought of your posts about it and I almost laughed at her.

Robin Fonner Andersen said...

In MD, they make you bring in the hard copy for the narc prescriptions. I work in institutional pharmacy and there's a whole department dedicated to mailing out scripts & keeping track of signed slips. Seems like a gravy job to me, but the people working there always whine how hard it is to do that job....

Anonymous said...

It's funny, if you drink your drug of choice, alcohol, it's classy and accepted. But if you take a pill, you're a junkie...