Drugs Samples

Samples are free medications provided by drug companies to physicians, to give to their patients. Samples are very useful, especially in acute disease states when the patient needs medication immediately and can’t wait to get a prescription filled in a pharmacy. Pharmaceutical companies provide samples to physicians to start new patients on the drug to determine if the drug might work for the patient before committing them on the drug long-term. Samples also create brand awareness and build product loyalty. Samples can save you a lot of money. Doctors, by law, cannot charge for samples. In many acute conditions, such as a routine strep throat infection or acute pain, the physician might have enough samples to cover the whole course of treatment. If your doctor, therefore, gives you a prescription and you can’t afford it, ask the doctor if he or she has free samples. Your doctor might have enough for the whole treatment or might have some to get you started and then you can fill the rest at the online pharmacy, hence saving you money. While samples are not ideal for chronic conditions, they nonetheless can be useful in chronic conditions as well. Your doctor might have "stock" bottles of medications. Usually samples are packaged to contain just a few pills to get you started on the drug. That’s why samples are also referred to as starters. For chronic conditions, some drug companies provide physicians with containers that have up to a month’s supply. Physicians have been known to sustain patients who cannot afford to buy medications for months on these stock bottles. There are many benefits to using samples:

• Samples are free. They have been used effectively by physicians to assist a lot of individuals who could not afford the price of the medication.
• Samples result in high compliance. Many individuals do not fill the prescriptions their doctors give them. With samples, however, the patient is getting the drug directly and has a higher chance of treating the condition.
• Samples help the doctor know if a particular medicine will work for a patient and if there are side effects that would make it wiser to switch to a different drug. Medicines do not all have the same effect on all patients, and other medications could be available for the same condition. By giving a patient samples for a short period of time, a doctor can determine if that patient should stay on that drug or try a different one.
• Samples help physicians become more familiar with new drugs. When a new drug comes out, the drug company promotes it heavily and gives out lots of samples. While the patients benefit from this new therapy, the physician has the chance to evaluate for himself or herself how the drug really works. It also allows the doctor to know if there are special patient types that the drug works better in, any special conditions or circumstances to keep an eye out for, and any dosage adjustments that need to be made.

Certain issues must be kept in mind as far as samples are concerned:

• Your doctor might fail to catch an important drug interaction. In a regular prescribing sequence, a patient receives a prescription from a doctor and uses a pharmacy to get the medication. With samples, the patient gets the medication directly from the doctor. In nearly every case, this works just fine. Pharmacists, however, play a role in catching medication errors and in checking for drug interactions. If a pharmacy is not involved, it makes even more sense to ensure that your doctor is aware of what medications you are taking, including herbal medicines. If you have any questions as to what you received, go back and ask your doctor or consult with your pharmacist. Another circumstance where a pharmacy can be of help is in the case where a medicine has been recalled because of safety or other concerns. If the pharmacy has a record that you are on the drug, at least another person besides your doctor can notify you.
• Samples might not be properly managed. Federal law, state law, and private regulatory bodies require the proper handling, storing, and accounting of samples. There have been circumstances, however, where samples were not being properly handled or patients were given medications that were no longer useful. Although this is rare, ask your doctor if you have any doubts. Also check the expiration date on the package you are given to ensure that the medication is still good. A word of caution, though, about expiration dates: expiration dates do not always determine when a drug stops working. So your doctor might give you a drug that has recently gone past its expiration day. Bring the issue up with your doctor. If the expiration day was not that long ago, your doctor may say it is fine to use.
• Be sure you are getting your sample from a person who is authorized to give you a prescription. While office staff members help the physician or prescribing personnel hand out medication, they can only do so with written orders from the prescriber. Be sure you are getting samples as a result of your doctor’s orders.
• Samples could cost you more money in the long run, because physicians give out samples of what they have and samples in physicians’ offices tend to be of new products that are usually more expensive than older drugs. So, if you have a chronic condition and you were started on an expensive product, although it was free at the beginning, staying on it might become costly in the long run. If you are given samples of an expensive medication, be sure the samples are enough to cover you for the course of the treatment. If not, ask your doctor if a lower cost drug is available, which, although you might have to pay for it, ensures that over time you come out ahead financially.

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