This article will set out all the guidance you need to make an informed decision about whether a pharmacy is genuine or not. In particular, we will look at the differences between an online pharmacy and an online clinic as well as giving some tips about how to spot whether a treatment is genuine or not. All the advice in this article applies to the United Kingdom only. Let’s start with the difference between an online pharmacy and an online clinic, sometimes also known as an “online consultation service” or an online “private prescription service”. An online pharmacy is exactly what it says it is ie a bricks and mortar pharmacy with an online presence. To tell whether an online pharmacy is genuine, the UK authorities have introduced an online kitemark scheme which links back to a database held by the General Pharmaceutical Council, the UK pharmacy body responsible for regulating UK Pharmacies. You can search the GPC register and find out details such as the physical address of the pharmacy, the name of the pharmacy superintendant plus other contact details. A genuine online pharmacy is licensed to accept NHS and private prescriptions and if you are in possession of either of these, most pharmacies will accept and fulfill any prescription treatment once the prescription has been sent to the pharmacy. Genuine, branded medicines from UK online pharmacy
In contrast, an “Online clinic” is the online equivalent of a regular GP’s surgery with one important limitation: only certain treatments are available and these are restricted to those that can be prescribed safely online. These treatments are sometimes referred to as “lifestyle” treatments and include prescriptions for common conditions such as impotence (known medically as erectile dysfunction or ED), obesity and baldness. More and more conditions are now treatable such as contraception, period delay and influenza as the idea of buying prescriptions online becomes increasingly acceptable.
When choosing an online clinic, it is important to ensure that it is registered with the Care Quality Commission which is the regulatory authority responsible for regulating all medical services in the UK. Registration with the CQC guarantees that the people who operate the service have been criminally record checked and the service uses genuine doctors and pharmacies registered with their respective regulatory authorities.
Once you have received your treatments, how do you tell that the treatments are genuine? The first thing to do is to check the labelling on the packet and specifically the production batch codes. These batch codes are unique to each manufacturer and all manufacturers have customer support services where you can check the validity of a batch code. The other tip is to check the pills themselves. You can expect a genuine medicine tablet to be brittle and hard and to be quite difficult to split. A counterfeit treatment will be softer and will typically crumble when split. One final note: it is very rare for counterfeit medication to end up in the genuine pharmaceutical supply chain although it is not unheard of. In 2007, a large amount of counterfeit cialis somehow got into the supply chain giving the authorities a real headache in terms of tracing and recalling the offending articles.
