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Know Where to Buy Your Meds

As a nurse, I often encounter patients who pay high insurance deductibles for medications or have limited insurance that does not cover all medication costs. What many people do not realize is that drug prices vary from pharmacy to pharmacy.

• For example, a 30 day supply of a popular generic high blood pressure med costs $4.00 at Wal-Mart. The exact same generic med costs $30.00 at Walgreens. However, Walgreens is sometimes cheaper for other meds. 

There's a great free app called GoodRx that compares prices of pharmacies in your area. I'd like to note that I don't work for GoodRx or get paid to endorse them. It's simply an easy-to-use app many hospitals and hospital professionals utilize to help patients with their medication costs. Also, GoodRx includes listings for pet meds! 




How does it work? Type in the name of the med and zip code. GoodRx then provides a list of pharmacies along with associated costs.

The app is completely free and is available for download in the Apple iTunes App store and Google Play Android store. Please see the GoodRx website for additional information. Also, please share with anyone who needs help with medication costs for himself or their pet!

Exercise Really Does Help with Depression - Here's Why

There are many possible causes of depression. Some have biological explanations (or, at least, speculations) — genetic vulnerability, medications, chemicals in the brain. Others are personal and psychological: Stressful life events such as illness, divorce, a death, unemployment. (Personally, I would add, there’s also the philosophical despair that follows exposure to inequality, injustice, violence, suffering, and misogyny.) It’s much easier for biomedicine to study the biological causes rather than the psychological (or philosophical) ones.

Physical exercise is often recommended as a way to alleviate depression and to alter our mood. Biomedicine would like to know if exercise really does change the chemicals in our brain. A recent article in NEJM reports on a study that suggests it does: Muscling In on Depression.
The explanation is rather technical but here’s my summary in a nutshell. Tryptophan, an essential amino acid in the human diet, is found in foods containing protein (it’s also in chocolate). When we experience stress, organs such as the liver produce enzymes that cause tryptophan to produce. In order to metabolize tryptophane, our bodies produce kynurenine. Sometimes quite large amounts are produced, and that's not good. Kynurenine is associated with depression, cognitive deficits of schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s, and tics. Exercise produces an enzyme that converts kynurenine to kynurenic acid, which is much better than having kynurenine floating around, wreaking havoc and causing depression.

Admirable, no doubt, but do I detect here the possibility that the pharmaceutical industry may soon be at work on a pill it can market as an alternative to exercise? Possibly. But in the meantime, exercise! It really does help with depression both physically and psychologically.

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