So my husband is on methadone for pain, a anti anxiety medication, blood pressure meds. They were all do dor refills on July 23rd but the office staff has said the only appt they have is on the 27th. I have called and begges them to see him earlier and they keep saying there’s nothing they can do. Going off a pain medication and anti anxiety meds cold turkey for a week can not be healthy. He is feeling absolutely horrible right now because he is so scared and anxious about having another heart attack. How can i get it through to the secretary at his Drs office that he needs a Dr appt earlier??? I just can’t see how this is acceptable. I even asked if he could go to the ER (yhe hospital owns the Dr office) to see if they could maybe let the ER Dr whats going on so maybe they could get him a script to make it to his appt. Keep in mind he isnt trying to get meds early, i just can’t see why they cant make an appt, it takes maybe 20 mins to see the Dr and have him write on a piece of paper. What do I do?? Have him call in the morning and beg for an appt AGAIN?? Going that long off meds with a heart condition just seems beyond unsafe… Pls help!
Do you get these at a pharmacy? If so, call the pharmacist and they will call the doctor’s office and get authorization and fill them.
If I’m missing some piece of info, I’m sorry.
The pharmacist can probably give him 4 days worth of his blood pressure medicines, if they’re standard maintenance meds that he’s been on for a while. Whether or not one will is another matter, but if you stay calm and there’s nothing hinky in his history, they may. Worth a try.
The methadone and anxiety meds, they probably won’t, though. You may need to take him to the ER if the pain or anxiety get too bad for him to handle.
Moderator Action
This is more advice and medical than factual, so let’s move it to IMHO.
Moving thread from General Question to In My Humble Opinion.
Just about every city/town I know of has a urgent care medical clinic that takes walkins.
My wife has a similar same problem with hydrocodone. Apparently there have been fairly recent changes in how opiates are prescribed, and now require a separate written prescription for each refill. The pharmacy cannot accept an OK over the phone from the doctor’s office.
However, my wife’s doctor will write a new scrip if we call the office and then pick it up personally. If I pick it up, the nurse will call home and inform my wife that someone is here to pick up her paper and she needs to approve that.
But at least once a year, maybe twice, she does have to have an office visit.
They also keep track of her recommended dosage and when it was last filled and will not authorize more until a few days before she runs out. Even then, the last time I picked up her refill the pharmacy told me that they could not issue the refill for 2 more days, even though the doctor wrote the prescription.
Its a tough world, thanks to the abusers.
Dennis
I don’t need to visit my doctor to get a prescription refill. I just call the pharmacy. Or in the case of a prescription which needs to be printed on paper, I call the doctors office for a refill, then pick the paper up at their office the next day.
This happened to me with my blood pressure medication and the pharmacist (Walgreens) refilled if for 1 month until I could get an appointment made with my Dr.
There’s a big difference between how blood pressure medicine prescriptions and opoid pain relievers are handled by pharmacists and prescribing doctors.
If you are on a maintenance prescription of regular pain relievers then you have a problem. One that should seek an alternate solution than continued prescriptions.
True other than the implication that a regular script = addiction. You might not be saying that but read it that way. But… Making a person go cold turkey until he can get and appointment and find something that works should have to be endured by the politician that is make the rules. It is not the docs, it is the ‘do gooder’ politicians.
Also the ones who tell the doctors that what is strong enough for an 98 pound woman is also enough for a 350 pound man.
What amazes me is that their are doctors out there now that believe that or are so afraid of the government that patient pain is no longer a concern of theirs. They can’t afford to give good care if the state or national legislatures are making the medical rules.
I have experienced this personally and I have been clean and sober for over 25 years, so accusations of of being an addict don’t fly.
Patients have some responsibility, too, though. If you have maintenance prescriptions and you know your doctor won’t write prescriptions for more than X number of months without seeing you, then you need to call for an appointment more than a couple of days before you run out of pills. And I assume that it’s a matter of the doctor wanting to see the patient, because otherwise an appointment to see the doctor wouldn’t be necessary - the doctor’s office can call or electronically transmit the prescription to the pharmacy or they can have the prescription ready for the patient to pick up at the office without seeing the doctor.
Don’t bother. The secretary works for the doctor/health system; they have given her those instructions about making appointments, and not overbooking.
Just have your husband show up in their office, and say he needs to see the doctor – and will just wait until they can squeeze in his short visit. Bring a book or two, and be prepared to wait for hours if needed. And don’t listen to what they say about needing an appointment, just keep repeating that you’ll wait until they can squeeze you in. The doctor will see you eventually.
P.S. Why did you wait until so close to running out of medications before calling for an appointment? Next time, plan to do this in advance.
Agreed, but…
Narcotic drugs must have hand carried script from Dr. No fax or computer sent Rx. Have the Dr signature which can not be anything but the original on each script. ( good ) A lot of the time, I can not get it the same day because of the checks and authorizations the pharmacy has to get from different government agency.
I can barely afford my co-pay for an office visit. Dr. must have an office visit to write a narcotic script. The allowed frequency to see the Dr, is fixed on my insurance or you pay the un-insured rate to the Dr. ( yeah, that is so doable )
If you live on SS only, that puts a crimp in things. Additionally, the pharmacy will not fill that script if the interval is too short according to government rules. (politicians say what is OK, not a Dr or your Dr and the Drs are all afraid of the politician set rules because of the government and their reasonable bureaucrats for some reason. With the penalty for exceeding the guide line at the level the decree says, the Dr’s can not legally prescribe pain medications of strengths needed in many cases. Or won’t for fear of the really strong penalties.
Stopping pill pushing and other gamers of the system from citizens & physicians is/was needed but there is no exception or review at the emergency level. The good part of socialized medicine working for the poor.
So with that class of medication, going early or expecting the Rx to be filled is not going to happen until the government regulations are all complied with which is what is best for the patient because the government says so.
Since I am not happy about it I must be an addict and even if it is not a maintenance type of situation, I must go to ‘pain management’ when the government has decided regardless of what my Dr says. If a patient wishes to have it reviewed they are still denied effective pain medication no matter the time frame that the process takes… I am sure glad that the compassionate government bureaucrats are so willing to work with the patient.
Oh well, it is just pain which no one can feel because it is not happening to them and that is just human nature. I will just suck it up… ::: I wonder if this could contribute to my attitude sometimes?
Doubtful they’d prescribe methadone or anti-anxiety meds, however, as they’d be likely to chalk the patient up as an abuser :(.
I don’t want to speak for someone else, but I think what is being said is that you do have to do some things early.
If you need to see the doctor every six months, make the next appointment each time you leave the doctor so you’re not scrambling.
Pick up the paper prescription three or four days before you can get the pills and take it to the pharmacy. They will fill it at the appropriate time and then you can pick it up as soon as possible.
My husband is on meds that require all the rigamarole and this is what he does. He never gets the drugs early, but he has to do the legwork early to get the pills when he needs them.
Just a thought: I can get my meds refilled 3 days before I run out. So, I have three day’s worth of pills when I pick up the next refill. I put those three days’ worth of meds aside, and start using the new prescription. Takes a while, but I have been able to accumulate a cushion of a week’s worth of pills. Comforting to have on hand.
Yep, that’s what I was talking about. You can’t get a narcotic prescription filled early, but you can see the doctor and get the written prescription early and you can even drop the prescription off at the pharmacy early so they can order it if they are out of stock.
I take a medication that I can’t afford to miss a dose of. I was told to never get below a two week supply. So I call the doctor when I’m down to a four week supply, to make sure I get an appointment when I have about three weeks left, which means that even if the pharmacy is out of stock and has to order it, I will have my pills way before I run out. I don’t wait until I have 2 weeks worth of pills left and then call the doctor and hope I can get an appointment the next day and hope the pharmacy has it in stock.
Now my pill isn’t a narcotic, and I know the pharmacy won’t fill a narcotic prescription two weeks early. But you can’t call the doctor on the 20th and expect an appointment in time to fill your prescription on the 23rd. It might feel like an emergency - but it was caused by waiting until the 20th to call for an appointment. Had you called on the 10th, you most likely would have gotten an appointment in time to get the prescription filled by the 23rd.
For methadone and pain pills?
I don’t know about methadone specifically, but I would hope that if you’re an established patient, and the prescription refills are within normal limits, a doctor wouldn’t insist on seeing you every month - though you might still have to pop in and physically pick the prescription up.
Just speculating here - doctors might vary and so on. But the time I needed a small additional supply of Ritalin (I keep a few to help when I have to drive while fatigued, was running low, and wasn’t slated to see them for 3 months), the doctor’s office just mailed me the paper.
My daughter takes Vyvanse for ADHD and has to have a new paper scrip every month. Because we have a mail order pharmacy that can save a fair bit on the cost, one month - let’s say early January - the doctor gave her 3 paper scrips. One for immediate, one saying “do not fill before Feb 1” (or whatever) and one saying “do not fill before March 1”, to see if this would let her get them via mail order.
Well, she mailed off the immediate and Feb 1 papers to the mail order pharmacy in early January.
And they looked at one, decided it was a duplicate, and ignored it. And they looked at the second one, saw “do not fill until”, and held that.
So, she ran out of medication for several days.
So, even planning ahead doesn’t help.
Not sure what plans do if you’ve got a requirement to use mail order (as my old policy did - you could get up to 3 months locally then mail order was mandatory or they paid NOTHING).
Thank heaven her antidepressants don’t fall under these rules. A day or two off the Vyvanse might make her miserable but won’t trigger the kind of symptoms one gets when going cold turkey with an SSRI.
See if your doctor will just date them correctly and let you hold on to the others. Don’t Mail more than one at a time, or just go and pick up the paper since he will write it without seeing her. Perhaps he could just leave them in her file and the nurse could hand it to you.