Questions in my search terms

if a doctor prescribes a new rx a week later can the pharmacist refuse to fill it legally?

Say your doctor prescribes a pain medication that gives you more nausea than pain relief. You try it for a week, but just can’t get past the side effects. So, your doctor prescribes a different pain medication, but since it’s only been a week since you got the last one, the pharmacist won’t fill it.

First you have to determine why the pharmacist refused to fill your prescription, which may be very hard to do. In the above example, if you explain your circumstances to the pharmacist, it seems like a quick call to the doctor would be enough to verify your story and get the script filled.

But there are so many other reasons that a pharmacist would refuse to fill a prescription, like because the inventory on that pain medication is very restricted and the pharmacist can’t add another patient to her monthly allotment of that drug. And maybe it’s not the pharmacist’s decision, but the decision of your insurance company or corporate policy.

Both doctors and patients should be aware of the limitations that opioid restrictions have on treatments and change procedures accordingly — like if you’re trying a new opioid, maybe only get a week’s prescription, just in case you need to switch it out. Of course, this means more doctor appointments…

Most pain patients probably don’t complain when doctors refuse to treat them or pharmacists refuse to fill prescriptions. Considering the stigma and shame in treating pain with opioids, I’m sure many patients just go home and suffer, while others will seek out the underground drug market.

I would advise sending an email to your state’s Medical Board, Board of Pharmacy, and anyone else you can think of. Unfortunately, you will probably not get any help from these agencies, but if they hear from enough people, it might make a difference.

how many people have died in nm from epiderial injections

I doubt anyone knows the answer to that question, but here’s the latest on injections from the FDA:

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1511754?query=TOC

(12/10/2015) Serious Neurologic Events after Epidural Glucocorticoid Injection — The FDA’s Risk Assessment

I understand that this is only about “serious” adverse events, but I think it’s very short-sighted to only look at the number of patients who have died due to injections. What about all those patients who have been disabled by the serious side effects of these treatments? Just because the result wasn’t death doesn’t mean that millions of pain patients haven’t been seriously affected by these treatments.