Hey,
Just a quick one. It’s always annoyed me that people go out and buy branded “common” drugs such as paracetamol, aspirin or pheylephrine (and so on…) If you look at what the pill contains : it’ll read something like “Paracetamol – 500mg” etc…it’s easy to check if you don’t believe me.
You’ll also perhaps notice that close to the expensive medicine, there is most of the time a chemists/supermarket “own brand” paracetamol. Usually, they’ll match the expensive pills in strength (the most likely difference is possibly changing how the body responds to the drug “pharmacokinetics” – affecting uptake/metabolism into active form) but for the most part, and for reasons that people generally take such medicine the difference is moot. Of course you’ll get a bit of placebo effect, cos you’ve paid top dollar for the medicine and whilst the pill is not exactly glam rock standards, there is usually enough embossed shiny stuff on the packaging to outdo a disco ball.
Last I checked, cheap ass paracetamol is around 16p-30p for 16 tablets, whilst expensive stuff goes up to £2 for the essentially the same thing. Think of what could be done with the change!
You could a) save it up, and spend it on yourself. Or if you don’t want big pharma to lose some of that profit margin, b) Next time you go buy medicine, go for generics rather than propietaries – work out how much you’ve saved and donate it to a charity that tries to secure and supply essential medication to those in need.
One such as http://www.msf.org.uk/
Ang
Saving the difference and donating is an awesome idea.
AFAIK this is just an idea and will remain so until someone decides to do it. I’m def. in to actually doing this if the rest of the flat want to participate. We’ll post our donation levels as we go. Main thing will probably be Sudafed/Phenylephrine – again AFAIK only Boots does generic versions of that.
It’s not like there is a shortage of Boots’ though is there!
LET’S DO THIS.
Also it’ll be an interesting insight into the amount of drugs we consume.
Ang arent you part of MSF? forgive me if im mistaken lol
nice bit of promo work there if u are
No actually. It was just the most obvious charity given the challenge. Obviously if someone has another charity in mind….
I think there is an obvious market here for us to sell our own-brand paracetamol.