Add this to the list of shortages:

[conuly]

Everything, yes, everything that you might by from a pharmacist. Not everything in stock in a drugstore, I don't think, just stuff that you need a prescription for.

Or so said our pharmacist, and she seemed harried enough that I'm sure she's not exaggerating even a little.

Comments

[librarygeek]

YES. Lidocaine jelly is one of those things we have a prescription for, but hasn't been able to be filled since the spring.

Fortunately, another medication change means that there hasn't been any of the lesions needing it since July, August?

[lilysea]

I wonder if this due to hurricanes hitting Puerto Rico? (Which is one of the major medication manufacturing locations in the world)

[redbird]

A lot of medicine passes through India at some point in the production cycle.

[dark_phoenix54]

Yeah, that's already been happening. Several times in the past couple of years I've been told they didn't have any meds for me, because the shipment was delayed/nonexistant. Yesterday I got 20 pills when it should have been 90 in my OCD/depression med. No estimate as to when they'd be able to give me the rest. Hopefully in less than 20 days. And hopefully this doesn't happen with insulin!

[wendelah1]

Thanks for the heads up. According to drugs.com, the only drug I take that's affected-- so far-- is losartan. I have a two week supply, with 2 refills left. It won't reorder itself so I'd better get going on that.

The vast majority of the shortages is injectables. IV solutions, morphine, antibiotics, steroids, sedatives, hypnotics, antirejection meds. Yes, insulin, too. Heparin. That's a lot of drug categories.

Hospital pharmacies must be going nuts.

[chez_jae]

Yikes!

[adafrog]

We were warned about a shortage of amoxicillin, but many pharmacies in town also don't have cephalosporins right now. :(

[fred_mouse]

Was thinking about your list of shortages, when I discovered that our state, with its incredible coastline, currently has a shortage of sand. Specifically, builders sand, of a quality one can put a concrete pad on and expect it not to shift and crack the concrete.

[conuly]

Oh, yeah, that shortage has been coming for a while, much like the helium shortage. It's been looming for easily a decade or more.

[rebeccmeister]

Yikes. Unsurprising, but, yikes.

[thekumquat]

Eek. We've had blips too, but everyone is blaming Brexit. What's the cause round your way?

[conuly]

I'm pretty sure the cause is the same as it's been for the past two years: the pandemic, plus all the flaws in the system that we'd more or less deluded ourselves into thinking weren't there pre-pandemic.

[pauamma]

I remember news reports from India I think about 1.5-2 years ago, about organized crime getting involved in the sand extraction industry, and I'm now wondering to what extent that shortage was helped along, even if that's not the only contributing factor.

[kengr]

One of the sillier ones is that my pharmacy can't get alcohol swabs (aka prep pads). They haven't been able to get the brand my insurance will cover for a year or so. So they've been cutting a deal with me for another brand.

Now *that* is backordered and one of the techs just growled and dug a bunch out of *their* (huge) box over by where they assemble vaccinations. Which was yet a third brand.

[thewayne]

What I hate is that I have this one med, my neuro med, that EVERY MONTH must be ordered when I fill it! Why are these database systems not smart enough to say "Well, it's been three weeks since Wayne last filled his order, we should go ahead and send a unit over to Albertson's so it's ready".

[conuly]

Some medications are like that by law. They can't just auto-refill.

[movingfinger]

This hasn't happened yet with my mother, but I'll mention it to my brother. Nothing we can do about it, and I don't think she keeps a month on hand for emergencies (as one should)---a lot of places won't prescribe that, or let you have it, or the insurer won't cover it and the cost is prohibitive. She takes all the blood pressure stuff these days.

[siderea]

I don't think that's what he's talking about. I understood the question to be: Given it must be dispensed one month at a time, why can't the computer notice that a patient is presenting that Rx month after month, and notify the warehouse to send a jug along to the pharmacy, so it will be available when the Rx is inevitably presented again.

There's a good/bad answer to that, about which I mean to write a post eventually. Back in the 80's it became all the rage in industry to do away with stocking up on things in advance, to save the cost of the warehouse to store them. The idea was just to use computers to keep track of inventory and stock flow to order what you need just when you would need it.

This way of doing business is 1) incredibly easy to do wrong, and 2) wildly vulnerable to production & shipping interruptions.

tl;dr: the computer probably did, and the warehouse just didn't have any to send.

[fred_mouse]

Huh. I knew about helium, and am very much against using it for balloons (both for this and the environmental/animal death reasons). But I hadn't been previously aware of sand. My understanding is that rising fuel costs have put smaller companies out of business.

[fred_mouse]

Huh. I mean, the fancy dancy mineral sands that one mines for phone parts, I can almost see. But builders' sand as an organised crime area boggles the mind!

[pauamma]

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/inside-india-sand-mining-mafia

[conuly]

There is a LOT of construction going on, at all times, and any business that big, the mob wants its cut.

[silveradept]

That's good to know, so I don't get completely upset at things that neither I nor someone else can control.