If you consult any doctor for a yeast infection, he or she will always prescribe medications. As yeast is a fungus, doctors prescribe anti-fungal tablets, anti-fungal suppositories, and anti-fungal creams. Most doctors world wide, start with anti-fungal creams. If the fungal infection does not respond to anti-fungal creams, then the doctor may prescribe oral anti-fungal medication. Some people don’t have the time to visit doctors and prefer to take over-the-counter medication for yeast infection. They may consult the pharmacist for the different types of over-the-counter medications.

Yeast is a very smart fungus and may become resistant to the over-the-counter medications if these medications are used repeatedly. Over-the-counter medication for yeast infection need to be taken as directed by the pharmacist. When the pharmacist gives you a week long medication, you need to adhere to that seven-day regime. Some people take the week-long medication for a couple of days and then stop the medication because the itching disappears. However, what they don’t realize is that only the symptoms of the infection have been reduced and not the entire infection. This yeast infection resurfaces after a few days.

Treating yeast infections is not as easy as it seems. If you have recurrent yeast infections, then you need to see a specialist immediately. The specialist for the yeast infections treatment is a dermatologist. You may have to take an appointment before you meet a dermatologist, so get the telephone numbers of the dermatologist and give him or her to fix up an appointment. In chronic yeast infection cases, the dermatologist may do a thorough diagnosis of the yeast infection.

Though yeast infections are not known to cause major illness, you need to get rid of the white menace as soon as possible. The dermatologist will first do a physical examination of the infected area and then ask you a few questions. If the situation is severe, the dermatologist may even ask for a urine analysis. Yeast cells can only be seen under a microscope; hence, a sample of the whitish discharge may be taken for further microscopic tests. If the tests are positive then the dermatologist will prescribe medications for yeast infections treatment.

A visit to the dermatologist may be a little expensive when compared to a regular doctor or physician. Because it is an area of specialization, most dermatologists are a preferred choice when the infection cannot be cured with regular over-the-counter medications. During the yeast infection treatment there are many precautions that you need to take.
Following are some precautions you need to take when you have yeast infection:

o You need to maintain personal hygiene and keep your surroundings clean.
o Stop wearing clothing that is made of synthetic instead; wear clothing made from natural fabrics.
o Stop wearing panties that are very tight instead wear well fitting cotton panties.
o Stop wearing tight jeans.
o If you get wet in the rain, then change to dry clothing immediately, yeast grows best in moist conditions.
o Stop the use of scented perfumes or sprays near sensitive areas such as the genital areas.

The above mentioned precautions are just few ones. For a complete list, you can either ask your dermatologist or research on the Internet. During the yeast infections treatment, the dermatologist may recommend certain diet regimes which aid in reducing the yeast infection.

First and foremost, the dermatologist will tell you to increase the intake of water. During the yeast infections treatment, it is recommended to drink at least eight glasses of water. The water must be at room temperature and appropriately filtered. If you find that drinking plain water is too bland, you can always add half lemon juice to it. However, make sure that you don’t add sugar to the solution.

When you are treating yeast infections, make sure to include a high amount of fresh fruits and vegetables in your diet. Fresh fruits help to boost your immune system and provide the necessary vitamins and minerals. Try and avoid starchy foods such as potatoes as they are known to enhance the growth of the yeast. Intake of sugars too needs to be reduced as that helps the yeast to grow faster. Other foods that help in reducing the yeast infection are garlic, yogurt, ginger, lamb, and fish.

Medicines are powerful substances and when you ingest them they can interact with the food you eat. This can make them work slower, faster or even prevent them from working. Some food and medicine combinations can even have toxic results. So you should be sure to ask both your doctor and your pharmacist if there are any foods or beverages you need to avoid while you are on the medication. You should also be sure to inform your doctor of all the medications you take when getting a prescription. This includes a complete list of vitamins and supplements.

Drink a full eight-ounce glass of water when taking pills and capsules. This will prevent irritation of your esophagus and stomach lining and increases the absorption of the medication by your body. This should be done with both prescription and over-the-counter medications. But don’t drink a hot beverage with the medication as heat interferes with the effectiveness of some medications. If a medication is taken on a daily basis, try to take it at the same time every day. Always adhere to the recommended dose. Taking more can be dangerous. Taking less may interfere with its effectiveness.

Since some medications are not compatible with certain foods it is important to ask your doctor and pharmacist about this when you receive any prescription. For example, tetracycline is a commonly prescribed antibiotic however consuming dairy products while taking the antibiotic can completely destroy its effectiveness. It has also been found that certain antidepressants known as monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs) may cause a dangerous rise in blood pressure if taken with any food that contains a substance known as tyramine. Aged cheeses, preserved meats such as salami, certain kinds of beans, sauerkraut and alcoholic beverages all contain tyramine. Since this blood pressure rise can even be fatal, if you are prescribed MAOIs, you need to be very certain of all the foods and beverages you should avoid.

Just recently, it has been discovered that grapefruit juice and grapefruit can increase the levels of some medications in the blood. The medical profession does not yet know all of the drugs that may be involved. They do know that it is true for most calcium channel blockers and for triazolam, a common sleeping pill. Because of the current uncertainty about this interaction, it is recommended that people wait at least an hour after taking any medication before eating citrus fruits or drinking citrus juices. Also, many medications are not compatible with alcoholic beverages as alcohol interacts with many different drugs both prescription and non-prescription so you need to check this on the label of any over the counter medications that you are purchasing.

Often prescriptions will specify whether a medication should be taken on an empty stomach or with food. If it is to be taken on an empty stomach, you should wait two to three hours after eating or take it an hour before eating. One bit of information that you also need but may not be included with the prescription, is what to do if you miss a dose. Since it is easy to forget, especially if you are not accustomed to taking medication, you should be sure to ask either the doctor or pharmacist about this.

There are all kinds of ways to get cheaper prescription drugs.

People recommend buying the higher dose of a drug and cutting it in half. This is a good idea for only a few drugs.

Drug manufactures have many different ways of pricing drugs. The few drugs that are priced the same regardless of the strength are a good way to save money by splitting the pill.

However studies have shown that pill splitting can result in up to a 20% variance in dose. So if you split a 200mg pill in half for a 100mg dose you may end up with 80mg for one dose and 120mg for a second dose. If you are taking the dose once a day, for a month, then taking 80mg one day and 120mg the next probably won’t hurt you.

The problem arises when a person sits down and cuts ALL of their pills in half when they first receive their prescription. It is then possible to get the 120 mg doses at the first of the month and the 80 mg doses at the end of the month and by the end of the month the person is not getting enough medicine.

Also tablets often have a coating to help prevent the medication in the tablet from getting exposed to the air, by cutting all the pills before they are to be taken will cause the medication in the tablet to degrade. Further splitting multiple pills at once, will result in many pills turning to powder.

Because your pharmacist works with pills all day, he or she knows their pricing structure, as well as the secrets to finding cheaper drugs.

There currently are pharmacies that are practicing therapeutic substitution when it comes to filling prescription medications. Therapeutic substitution happens when a drug that is considered to be therapeutically equivalent to a second drug, even though it might not be chemically equivalent to the prescribed drug, is given to the person filling the prescription without their permission or acknowledgment. That means that a pharmacy can change your prescribed medication to a different one without asking for your permission or letting you know beforehand. It can happen due to costs to the insurer, changes in insurance coverage, new drugs on the market that can treat the same condition, a medication is no longer covered by the insurance company, when your doctor wants you to switch to a drug that might be more effective, and when another drug is available at a lower cost. Pharmacies can also do a substitution if the drug you are prescribed is not on the pre-approved list that insurance will cover.

There are negative sides to therapeutic substitution because the new drug might not work as well or might differently that the one originally prescribed. It could have side effects that you are not aware of or might have a negative interaction with other prescriptions that you make take. The new drug might have a dosing schedule that could be inconvenient for you.

It is recommended to check the label of your medication after it is filled to make sure that it is the one that was originally prescribed. If you have questions or feel unsure about something, don’t feel afraid to talk to your pharmacist.

Disposing of medicines is a tricky subject. No one wants to be responsible for making someone else sick, especially a child, but that is the risk of improperly disposing of medications. For the person they are prescribed for, medicines can be life-saving. But oftentimes, people have leftovers they are unsure how to dispose of. Most medicines have disposal instructions on the label, but if yours doesn’t, here is the proper disposal procedure for most medications.

Many medicines can be thrown away in your regular household trash if you mix them with something unpalatable, such as coffee grounds and sealing them in a bag or plastic container. Some localities have “drug take-back programs” which accept and safely dispose of your unused or expired medications. Your local government’s trash and recycling service is a good place to start to find out if there is a program offered in your area. Your pharmacist is another authority that might know of these types of programs. The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration advises that “up to 80% of drug users take medications belonging to friends or relatives” so by utilizing a drug take back program you are doing far more than simply disposing of unwanted drugs.

Certain medications can be fatal for children in a single dose and these are usually the ones with special disposal instructions. Usually, these medicines can be flushed down the toilet so “they cannot be accidentally used by children, pets, or anybody else.” If your medication does not have disposal recommendations on the label, you can call the pharmacy where you purchased it or check the US Food and Drug Administration ’s website for their advice. Some environmentalists are concerned that flushing medications down a drain can result in those medications being found later in our water system, but the truth is that “the majority of medicines found in the water system are a result of the body’s natural routes of drug elimination (in urine or feces.” Some of the medicines that should be disposed of by flushing include Demerol, Morphine Sulfate, Oxycontin, and Percocet.

I am a pharmacist. When I lived in Miami, I had a regular patient (aka Janet) that would come in and talk with me about her dogs (my favorite subject!) She had been in New York for a few weeks for work. Before she had left for her trip, she had picked up a prescription for Diflucan (fluconazole)-a treatment for a yeast infection.

Janet came into the pharmacy and barely mentioned her new puppy (Charlie). She seemed upset and irritated. She was picking up another Diflucan prescription. So, I asked her what was up.

She was at wits end- she had been treating a yeast infection for about 2 months. At first, she self treated with OTC medications then with her physician. Janet’s physician gave her some prescription creams and then Diflucan.

We talked about all of her concerns…

What the symptoms are…

Symptoms range from none to swollen, red, itchy, irritated vaginal/vulvar tissues, discharge and odor -or any combination.

Even once the infection is cleared up (about 3-5 days) the symptoms can remain for up to 14 days -this is a problem because many women think that they still have an active infection.

We talked about how you get a yeast infection…

All women naturally have a small amount of yeast (candida albicans) in the vagina. The infection occurs when there is too much of the yeast. This can happen anytime -it is usually caused by medications (like antibiotics), injury, stress or other sickness.

Studies show that for some women who get recurring yeast infections, their risk is increased by using panty-hose, panty liners, sexual lubricants and drinking cranberry juice.

How is it treated?…

OTC vaginal creams and suppositories (such as Monistat) -they usually come in 1-day, 3-day and 7-day treatments. I usually recommend a 3-day treatment for most women.

Prescription vaginal creams and suppositories (like Gynazole) -these are not usually any better than the OTC creams.

Helpful Hint: Be careful -the creams can breakdown condoms.

Diflucan (fluconazole) is a prescription oral medication. Usually 1 tablet is taken once (sometimes it is repeated in 3 days). The tricky thing about the pill is that although it often only one tablet, the symptoms still take about 3 days to go away (you can use an OTC cream to help).

Boric acid vaginal suppositories -this is what Janet and I talked about mostly because she had already been through all the other options. She wanted to know why it had to come down to some random treatment she had never even heard of. There are three main reasons

1) There are different kinds of yeast that can cause infections. Most kinds of infections are treated by the normal treatments but there are some yeast infections that can ONLY be treated with boric acid.

2) Sometimes the infection is not caused by yeast but by a bacteria…none of the anti-fungal will help but boric acid can treat yeast and bacteria.

3) Sometimes, when a woman with a yeast infection uses a bunch of different treatments, the vagina just gets “unbalanced” -boric acid corrects the pH and kinda gives the vagina a “re-boot” back to baseline.

The regular dose is 600mg boric acid (in type 0 capsules) inserted vaginally at bedtime for 14 days. They need to be compounded so -you need a prescription and a compounding pharmacy.

Back to Janet- I printed out some info about boric acid that she could show her physician. She had to go back up to New York for another month but she called a couple of times to update me on her progress -she said her doctor looked at her like she was crazy at first but after reading about it gave her the prescription, she went to a compounding pharmacy and all has been good for her.

So that is great…here is the funny part- a few weeks later, I had a woman come to the pharmacy and asked if we have boric acid. I started talking to her about how it needs to be compounded with a specific capsule because yadda yadda yadda…

Her face was frozen in confusion and a bit of fear…I stopped talking and she said, “I…uhhh….just wanted some boric acid powder,” pause while we both looked at each other puzzled. She then continued, “You know…for cleaning.”

Boric acid for cleaning….who knew?!

As we get older, it seems our medicine cabinets collect more drugs: potions, creams, pills, capsules, liquids, you name it. These prescriptions are expensive, even with good insurance and Medicare, so make yourself D-R-U-G S-M-A-R-T with these tips for managing your meds.

D: Different drugs within the same class often have considerably different costs. Manufacturers would like you to think that only your exact, specific drug will work for your condition, but that is not always the case. True, different people react in different ways, but you might be able to substitute a less expensive drug for your condition, such as a standard that has been around for years rather than a new formulation just released.

R: Raise the issue of cost with your doctor, both for new prescriptions and for those you currently take. Your doctor probably doesn’t know what kind of insurance you have or whether you must be concerned about drug costs. With some drugs today costing $100 for a single pill, you don’t have to be embarrassed to ask.

U: Use a pill splitter if your doctor says it’s OK in your case. Much of the cost of some medications is in the individual tablet rather than in the strength. You might be able to purchase twice the dosage for little more than your current prescription, split each pill, and reduce medicine costs by nearly half.

G: Generics are sensible substitutes for many brand-name medicines. Thousands of drugstores and grocery pharmacies now offer 30-day supplies of generics for $4 or 90-day supplies for $10. Both your doctor and your pharmacist can tell you if there is a generic version of the drug you take.

S: Samples your doctor offers free are tempting and can be welcome, but manufacturers supply those to sell prescriptions. Be sure that specific free drug is the best one for your condition.

M: Make sure you tell your physician about ALL the medications you are taking, including such simple things as daily multivitamins, fish oil capsules, and herbal supplements. If you have to see a specialist for a new illness or problem that has come up, take a written list of all your prescriptions and supplements with you. Possibilities for drug interactions increase as your list of meds grows, so don’t take chances on trying to remember everything you take.

A: Ask why you need another drug if your doctor prescribes one. Ask if that is the best drug and if it is FDA-approved for your specific condition. Some drugs are prescribed for conditions or age groups other than those for which it was originally formulated, based on anecdotal evidence that it sometimes helps for this other purpose. If this turns out to be the case with your new med, ask for evidence that it is effective in your case.

R: Remember to tell your doctor about any side effects you have from any of your medicines, especially from new prescriptions. Even though drugs are tested extensively on hundreds of thousands of people, a variety of adverse side effects accompanies each medication. Perhaps only 2% of the population experiences this side effect, but if you are one of the 2%, the side effect can seriously deter your recovery.

T: Take all of your prescribed drug, and take it correctly. If it is temporary, such as an antibiotic for a sore throat, don’t stop taking the drug halfway through because you begin to feel better. Some of those nasty little fellows remain in your body, even after you feel better, and they continue to grow. This is one way antibiotic-resistant bacteria appear. They are weakened but not killed by the medicine, so they recover and become stronger when the drug is stopped. Medicines you take regularly are equally important. Your condition won’t be well controlled if you don’t take the correct amount of the drug.

Copyright 2009 Linda Manley

Doctors and physicians have the education and experience to write prescriptions for common drugs to help patients recover from illness, reduce pain, and help treat injuries. Unfortunately, prescription errors may occur and the effects can range from mild discomfort to severe illness or injury to the patient. Some instances of prescription drug errors have even resulted in the death of the patient, and many of those cases were the direct result of missed allergic information or improper prescriptions.

Although the average patient is usually not qualified or experienced enough to write medical prescriptions, there are a few things individuals can do to ensure they receive the proper treatment. Proper education, communication, and double-checking received information may help avoid tragic errors in your medical care.

Steps to Take to Avoid Errors

? Always be forthcoming with your doctor about any previous medical treatments, allergies, and medicines you are currently taking. This information may be essential in ensuring your prescription does not include harmful ingredients.

? Clarify instructions if you are unsure of the doctor’s orders. Many patient injuries are the result of over-dosage or other misuse of prescription drugs.

? Ask your doctor any questions you may have about possible side-effects and alternate medicines if you are uncomfortable with the prescription being given.

? Get a second-opinion if you are unsure if the plan of action is going to be effective for you.

? Make sure that the prescription given to you by your physician is legible for the pharmacist. Doctors are notorious for handing over scribbled prescriptions, but any error in spelling or readability may spell disaster at the pharmacy.

? Make sure your pharmacist is comfortable with the prescription assigned and make sure he or she contacts the doctor directly if there are any questions or uncertainties with the type of medicine, instructions, or amount of medicine ordered.

? Take the time to examine labels before taking anything. Read instructions carefully and make sure you know what, when, and how to take the medication.

? Contact your doctor immediately if you feel ill or if you suspect something is wrong. Seek immediate medical help if the symptoms get worse or if new symptoms appear.

By following these simple steps, patients can help ensure that prescription drug errors do not occur. If you would like more information on prescription drug errors, visit the website of Pennsylvania medical malpractice attorneys Lowenthal & Abrams.