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Comment by HideousKojima | Hacker News Reader

And I can't stockpile it for allergy season (which is about 9 months out of the year for me). I have to make regularly scheduled trips to the pharmacy every two weeks which is a huge pain in the ass

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My life on an ADHD med, a mental health med, and 3 other meds for transgender stuff.

I am very lucky to have a backlog of estradiol, my main HRT drug, because I was purposely "playing under speed" for most of a year, otherwise all 5 drugs would be randomly running out at 5 different times throughout the month. Almost nothing gets assigned to 90-day fills for some stupid fucking reason.

So from personal experience you can often just ask docs for a longer prescription if something isn't particularly restricted (like stimulant-type ADHD medications).

From friends, I know that some therapists and endocrinologists are willing to give 6 mo or even 1 yr scripts of hormones, though some will only do so under certain conditions. You might want to find a different doc. I know one person who gets a 3 mo supply of estradiol from a telehealth provider.

I once actually got denied and had to buy a smaller box (for the same price). What the hell happens to families with multiple teens who all get sick at the same time?

Any reason you choose to take PE rather than a corticosteroid nasal spray?

Corticosteroids are powerful substances, and have lots of potential adverse effects - and long-term usage can wreak havoc. The physiological side-effects of corticosteroid withdrawal can be quite awful. They are amazing, necessary, drugs for society. But, when something as safe and effective as pseudoephedrine can do the trick (it really is quite safe, and even has less potential interactions with things than plenty of OTC drugs do), there is literally no reason for anything else.

When I get a cold, (pseudo)ephedrine is the only medication that actually really helps. I don't need it often, I just try to remember to buy some once in a blue moon when I'm already at the pharmacy so that when I need some, it will be there. But for people with allergies or those who get sick a lot, the current process is yet another completely pointless annoyance.

Corticosteroid nasal spray does not have the same effects as when it is administered in other ways and is safe even for long-time use as three different doctors in my country told me.

Yep - I think parent poster is conflating the effects of oral corticosteroid use (which believe me, I know, and they SUCK) with topical usage.

Yes, I was. Thank you both for pointing this out.

I just spent dug in to this and, wow, I was wrong! Most all the negatives that occur with parenteral and oral routes appear to be absent in the intranasal form. And there is quite a lot of research to back that up.

Thank you for correcting me. And likely sending me down another rabbit hole.

You take 48 pills in two weeks?!

That’s pretty easy when the dose is two pills every six hours.

They make twelve hour extended release versions now. There are twelve per box and you can get three boxes at a time. That's 18 days but only if you take them twice a day, which you probably shouldn't if you like sleeping. If you take one a day, that's a whole month's worth.

You're going to have serious issues if you take that much. It's causes major problems after a few days.

I can get 15 of the 24 hour generic Claritins every 2 weeks. Works out to about 1 a day

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