Drugstore Shortage Concerns Doctors

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A study published from the Academic Emergency Medicine has reported a significant shortage on drugs available for patients, and it's alarming doctors.

According to Med Page Today, the drug shortage has inflated by five times between 2008 and 2014 after a seven-year decline in medicine supply. This shortage is hurting physicians and emergency centers.

The study noted that among the 1,798 drugs that were reported to have experienced a lack in supply from January 2001 to March 2014, 610 or 33.9 percent of the number are emergency medicine. Meanwhile, 321 or 52.6 percent are life-saving drugs or for high-acuity conditions while 32 or 10.0 percent cannot be substituted by any alternative.

But it doesn't end there, because from January 2008 to March 2014, the shortage on emergency medicine inflated from 23 to 123 or by a whopping 435 percent. Meanwhile, life-saving or high-acuity drugs also increased from 14 to 69 or by 393 percent while those without any substituted grew four to nine or by 125 percent.

Due to this shortage, doctors are forced to find alternatives to unavailable drugs that they have previously prescribed to their patients. Jesse Pines, MD, MBA, director of the Office for Clinical Practice Innovation and professor of emergency medicine at George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences, said that these alternative medicines carry with them unfamiliar side effects and may not show yield the expected effectiveness rate as that of the originally prescribed drug.

When the manufacturers' of these drugs were contacted, no clear reason for the shortage was given. The study also notes that emergency medicine for infectious disease showed the highest number of shortage. Med Page Today notes that a quarter of the shortage was due to manufacturing delays while 15 percent of the shortage was due to outstripped supply.

Pines also attributed the shortage to the stricter rules implemented by the FDA, which resulted to the halt in manufacturing certain drugs. He also observed that the shortage is somehow correlated with the economic fluctuation from 2008 to 2009.

"I think the FDA thing is a minor issue. I think the real issue is economics.", Mark Reiter, MD, MBA, president of the American Academy of Emergency Medicine and an emergency physician in Nashville, Tennessee, said.

Pines also agrees to Reiter's statement, saying, "Basically a lot of these companies are stopping producing these medicines primarily for business reasons."

Reiter said that the reason emergency medicine is seeing a shortage because it heavily relies on generic drugs; however, pharmaceutical companies earn more revenue on branded products than generic ones. He further added that to alleviate this drug shortage, the government must coordinate with these manufacturers to ensure a steady supply of vital medicine to the public.