A 34-year-old housewares designer in the St. Louis area, Hubbard had recently gotten married.

She liked the creativity of her career. And she’d conquered her mild depression and fatigue with a combination of exercise, rest and medicine, including the antidepressant Wellbutrin XL.

But in the fall of 2006, shortly after she refilled her prescription — her pharmacy giving her this time Budeprion XL, a generic version of the drug — her good health gave way.

Within a month, she had gained 15 pounds, couldn’t sleep well, developed gastrointestinal problems and felt such extreme fatigue and lack of motivation that she thought about quitting her job. She cried and called in sick for days at a time. “I chalked it up to exhaustion after the whirlwind of the wedding and honeymoon,” Hubbard says.

Yet she wasn’t getting better. Her doctor referred her to four specialists, but none, she complains, “were really listening to me — they were just anxious to give me another drug.”

They diagnosed her alternately with severe allergies, a heart murmur, a slow thyroid, irritable bowel syndrome, gluten intolerance, mononucleosis and chronic pain.

She cycled on and off different drugs: Ambien to help her sleep at night; Provigil to keep her awake during the day; Allegra, Zyrtec and Nasacort for allergies; Lexapro, Zoloft and Xanax for anxiety and depression; Zelnorm for bowel problems. And she continued on the Budeprion XL the entire time. “I was fighting for almost a year with the insurance company over all the tests and therapy I needed,” Hubbard adds.

After eight months of struggling with her mystery ailments, she was out to dinner with a friend and mentioned that she needed to refill her prescription. Her friend said she’d recently gone off Wellbutrin and had some leftover pills Hubbard could use.

Within a week, Hubbard’s troubling symptoms vanished. Her energy came roaring back. And that is when she finally connected the dots: Her problems had begun mere days after she first took the generic. Because generics had always worked well for other conditions, she says, “I never even gave it a second thought or mentioned the pharmacy’s switch to my doctor.” Until now.

She called her doctor to complain about the generic and request a new prescription for the brand name only. The nurse’s response floored her. “Yes,” the nurse said matter-of-factly. “We hear that all the time.”

Why your M.D. is worried
If you took a prescription pill recently, odds are it was generic: Nowadays, generics constitute almost 70 percent of all the prescriptions dispensed nationwide, racking up $58 billion in sales in 2007. Anxious to cut costs, health insurers are stampeding to switch patients to drugs that are cheaper to make, test and ultimately buy because their manufacturers can piggyback on the research and marketing already done by brand-name-drug companies. Pharmacists in most states are also free to give patients whichever version of a drug is cheapest for them to supply, without telling the prescribing doctor; in some states, pharmacies are required to make this switch. And few of us complain when it happens: Women who wouldn’t dream of substituting Diet Pepsi for Diet Coke, simply because of the taste, eagerly swap vital medications, because the change can cut co-pays in half.

Many lawmakers and health-policy experts say the trend has little downside. “Generic drugs have the same active ingredient that brand-name drugs do and are made in FDA-approved plants, just as brand-name drugs are,” says Aaron S. Kesselheim, M.D., an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston. In an analysis recently published in The Journal of the American Medical Association, Dr. Kesselheim reviewed data from 47 clinical studies and found no evidence that patients on brand-name cardiovascular drugs had clinical outcomes superior to those on generics. Given these results, and the lengths that some brand-name-drug companies have gone to protect their patents and profits, it’s easy to believe that any supposed problems with generics are “a story cooked up by Big Pharma” — the conclusion reached by consumer watchdog Peter Lurie, M.D., deputy director of the health-research group at Public Citizen in Washington, D.C.

But a yearlong investigation by SELF — including more than 50 interviews and records leaked from one of the world’s largest generic-drug companies, Ranbaxy Laboratories — raises questions about whether some new generics are as safe or effective as the brand names. Although Dr. Kesselheim’s review looked at all of the available data, many of those studies were completed before the recent flood of generics hit the market and many generic-drug factories moved overseas. In FDA applications for new generic drugs, nearly 90 percent of the factories providing active ingredients are located overseas, where the agency’s inspection rate dropped 57 percent between 2001 and 2008.

http://today.msnbc.msn.com

What do I mean exactly?

Its a well-known fact that online pharmacy sales is one of THE growth industries on the interweb today, and regardless of whether the globe is sitting in the teeth of a financial downturn or not, people still want to save money on their medications, and the web-marketeers know this all too well.

This situation has created an epidemic of new online pharmacy outlets and whilst a great many of these are bona-fide enterprises operating within the bounds of the law, the vast majority are companies who are simply looking to make a fast-buck, and they wish to make it at our (yours and mine) expense.

Check out any “get rich quick” mart like Clickbank or similar and online pharmaceuticals will play a large part in the business they undertake on a day to day basis. Often marketed as “an opportunity to earn thousands from home, with little or no effort on your part”, online medication is seen as a simple way of earning money online.

Once signed into such a program the new affiliate is then looking for ways to drive traffic to his or her online pharmacy, and rather than take the steps necessary to build a reputable online brand name the majority of these web-marketers actually have no concept of how to go about doing this, and instead choose to take the spam route instead.

Meaning a valuable informational resource such as Provigil-RX will be spoiled were it not for the fastidious deletion of the hundreds of spam links which get posted every single week. And its fair to mention they’re not always from “lone-wolf” web marketers.

For instance, just yesterday (April 24th) a comment was left on this post, which read “Of course cost have risen but there are online pharmacies which help you save on your medical bills. They have really helped me save a lot of my money”. The subscriber called him or herself “Smily Joy”.

Of course thats not what the poster actually wrote as the post was in fact, edited prior to publication.

The post actually mentioned an online pharmacy based in India. Quite a well known pharmacy it is too, and this poster explained how much money using this particular pharmacy had saved them.

As a great many websites similar to Provigil-RX are created simply to entice people into clicking targeted adsense adverts its fair to assume that in a lot of instances these spammy posts actually make it through, and go onto advertise the services of a great many online pharmacies of dubious repute.

But in this instance we actually have a web-team who edit all comments prior to publication and on checking the IP address of this thrifty meds-buyer, it turns out to be not from America, Canada or the UK, but is actually from an IP address based in (surprise surprise), Mumbai in India.

And as the spammy content was advertising an online pharmacy based also in India, in this instance its fair to assume 2+2=4, and the post was made by someone attached to the online pharmacy.

Without a doubt, were it not for these pharmacists of ill-repute, there would be no need to offer the most complete and up to date information regarding Provigil/Modafinil/Modalert, (depending which country you live in), as its just these companies our information is designed to protect the honest meds buyer from. Companies who will sell sometimes dangerous/lethal medicines to whoever can pay the asking price.

So here’s what we intend to do.

If you are intent on spamming our website in a bid to advertise your online drug sales, we will, through our sister website cannazine.co.uk, which is an accredited Google News source, give your pharmacy all the publicity it could ever wish for by “outing” it on Google News, as a business which makes its money by spamming bona-fide websites such as our own.

The cannazine website is heavily indexed by Google and as such your pharmacy name will soon appear at the top of the search results for your chosen “poisons”, but for all the wrong reasons, which will undoubtedly undo all of your “hard work” to date.

So I recommend you move along and find a less protected website to sow your spam.

Provigil-RX.Info