PROBLEM As countries expand health insurance coverage, their expenditures on medicines increase. To address this problem, WHO has recommended that every country draw up a list of essential medicines. Although most medicines on the list are generics, in many countries patented medicines represent a substantial portion of pharmaceutical expenditure. APPROACH To help control expenditure on paten...

The study was carried out to evaluate community pharmacists' and drug retailers' knowledge and perceptions about generic medicines. A cross-sectional descriptive study, with a questionnaire, was conducted to survey community pharmacists and drug retailers working in 39 randomly selected private pharmacies from two towns of Tamil Nadu, India. Among 66 respondents (pharmacists and drug retailers)...

Natural medicines and diabetes have something in common: millions of people have diabetes and millions use natural medicines. Not surprisingly, many diabetes patients are users of natural medicines. In fact, some surveys show that about 60% of patients with diabetes use some form of alternative medicine.17464 In some populations, such as southwest Native Americans, use of natural medicines and ...

Background Australian government expenditures on chemotherapy medicines are increasing faster than any other area of health care with an average annual growth rate of 63% from 2009/10 to 2013/14. Funding decisions on new, high-cost cancer medicines are challenging because of insufficient evidence on benefits and risks of new cancer medicines and high prices requested by pharmaceutical companies...

OBJECTIVE To examine, for essential anti-cancer medicines, the alignment of national lists of essential medicines and national reimbursable medicines lists with the World Health Organization's (WHO's) Model Lists. METHODS National medicine lists for 135 countries with per-capita gross national incomes below 25 000 United States dollars in 2015 were compared with WHO's 2013 and 2015 Model List...

Nature always stands as a golden mark to exemplify the outstanding phenomena of symbiosis. In the western world, as the people are becoming aware of the potency and side effect of synthetic drugs, there is an increasing interest in the natural product remedies with a basic approach towards the nature. Throughout the history of mankind, many infectious diseases have been treated with herbals. A ...

Medicines have evolved over time and so has the realisation of the importance of quality control and regulatory processes. The regulatory practices include all the steps from the development and manufacture of the active ingredients until the medicines reach the consumer. The Medicines Control Council (MCC) is mandated to regulate medicines in South Africa. Complementary medicines were previous...

PURPOSE The purpose of this survey is to outline pharmacy services in hospitals on a regional level in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. METHODS A modified-American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP) survey questionnaire as pertinent to Saudi Arabia was used to conduct a national survey. After discussing with the pharmacy directors of 48 hospitals in the Riyadh region over the phone on th...

The Pharmaceutical Assistance Cycle (PA) is the basis for healthcare services through which pharmaceutical assistance and expertise can be implemented in a functional and structured way to meet public health demands, adhere to the Brazilian Ministry of Health vision, and strike a balance in the contemporary struggle for health equity. The aim of this research is to analyze the effectiveness of ...