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Pharmacy Practice Consultant Van Mil Consultancy Margrietlaan 1, NL 9471 CT Zuidlaren, Netherlands fax 31 50 4094766 jwfvmil{at}planet.nl
Published Online, June 24, 2008. www.theannals.com, DOI 10.1345/aph.1K560a
Weight, hardness, and format of preparations are hardly relevant for clinical practice, as long as the tablets or capsules can be swallowed and dissolve sufficiently. More than half of the preparations studied did neatly comply with US standards in technical terms such as content, dissolution, and drug release. But bioavailability studies have not been conducted, so there is no final answer on the question of how much medicine actually gets to where it exerts its action and how safe the products are.
The only conclusion that, in my view, would be justified is that there are products available through the Internet with physical characteristics that are different from those of a certain brand product and some of these products will have, perhaps, a different bioavailability. And that message is really not new.
Whether the Internet products have or have not been manufactured under the same standards as the reference product has not been studied; all that has been studied is whether the ready preparations comply with public US Pharmacopoeia standards. Lastly, it may well be that generic products from certain US pharmacies also have characteristics that are different from those of the reference product and that the findings are not specific to Internet delivery.
References
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