chinese warfarin

[Lisa in Katy]

You're right, Marsha, savings is savings, which is why I convinced my doctor to let me take 7.5 mg Sunday-Friday, and half or 3.75 mg on Saturday instead of my previous dose of 7 mg every day. My current dose is 48.75 mg per week and my previous was 49 mg. The difference is that now I take 6 1/2 pills each week and before I took 14, or slightly less than 1 prescription each month vs. 2 prescriptions each month, an annual savings of about $48.

What I meant is for people who are trying to decide how to afford this, the pills themselves are the smallest part of their worries.

 

[catwoman]

You're right, Marsha, savings is savings, which is why I convinced my doctor to let me take 7.5 mg Sunday-Friday, and half or 3.75 mg on Saturday instead of my previous dose of 7 mg every day. My current dose is 48.75 mg per week and my previous was 49 mg. The difference is that now I take 6 1/2 pills each week and before I took 14, or slightly less than 1 prescription each month vs. 2 prescriptions each month, an annual savings of about $48.

What I meant is for people who are trying to decide how to afford this, the pills themselves are the smallest part of their worries.

You're right -- the pills are the smallest part. It's everything else.

 

[lance]

ok, here's my story. i was prescribed 90 days warfarin as i have a meat valve.
i was in range with 4mg, but change in diet ingredients and increase in exercise
raised my dosage to 5mg. i no longer had enough on hand, so had to buy
some local chinese produced warfarin.

i switched over to the chinese pills four days before my last pt-inr test.
that test showed my pt-time at 1.26, so i raised my dose to 6.5mg/day.

a week later, that would be today, i retested and my pt-inr is down to
1.08, which is like completely anti-coagulated. i expected i might be a
tad high judging by clotting speed after the nurse pulled the butterfly,
didn't expect no effect from the meds at all.

so either the test is off (probable) or the chinese medicine is crap (also
probable). [however i have been doing some heavy exercise lately, as
well as upping veggie consumption....]

so what to do?

a) continue at 6.25 for another two weeks when i run out.
b) increase to 7.5 for one week then run out.
c) trash the pills as i'm already over 90 days out.


photo below is the warfarin box. the first three characters are meaningless
here, they just make the sounds "HUA-FA-LIN", the next two characters
mean sodium tablet.

Chou Dou Fu
Your English translation puzzles me especially the "sodium" part. Never mind the mice/rats maybe what you have been taking is just "sodium" in other words "salt". If so that would explain your test results.
As someone else pointed out pharmaceuticals from China? No way Jose in Caps. One has only to look at the melamine containing baby milk and companion animal feed. That's lesson eough for me.

 

[KristyW]

Chou Dou Fu
Your English translation puzzles me especially the "sodium" part.

Lance,

If you look at the actual pharmaceutical name for Coumadin, it is Warfarin sodium. I get my meds from right here in the USA and plain as day on the info sheet it says warfarin sodium.

 

[ChouDoufu]

Chou Dou Fu
Your English translation puzzles me especially the "sodium" part.

i was explaining the difficulty of using chinese, sometimes the characters
mean things, sometimes they're just noise. in this case (see pic of box
from first post) the box contains "warfarin sodium tablets."

towards the top you have five really large characters. the first three mean:

1) brilliant, magnificent, flourishing, flashy, or grizzled.
2) law, method, or way. also means french.
3) woods, grove, or forest

so in this context, they are meaningless. but the sounds represented
by the characters are HUA, FA, LIN.....sounds sorta like.....warfarin.

the next character is NA meaning sodium (interestingly Na on periodic
chart = sodium). the final character PIAN means tablet.

so there you have "huafalin" sodium tablets.

or, um grizzly french forest salt pills. aha, that explains the test results!!!

as to chinese pharma, the local doctor feels the same way. when i asked
about a script for warfarin, he said the meds here are iffy, and if any way
possible, try to make the foreign stuff last.

 

[Bina]

I can't wait to ask my pharmacist for "grizzly french forest salt pills".....

 

[ChouDoufu]

they go great with chef's chocolate salty balls!!

 

[Ross]

While Choudoufu lives in China and got his warfarin there, I wouldn't expect any other U.S. citizen to be getting their drugs from anywhere except here and perhaps Canada.

There is no way of guaranteeing the quality, age, or potency of drugs from abroad. If you want to be a responsible patient, do things responsibly.

 

[Bina]

Well, it's only name brand Coumadin for me.

 

[Lisa in Katy]

There are reported issues with drugs manufactured in both India and China and being imported into the US. Apparently in the past, the FDA didn't do a very good job of inspecting these plants. However, more recently, they have rejected drugs from particular plants in both countries and shut down some manufacturing lines.

So how do we protect ourselves? Get regular INR tests to insure that whichever one you are taking is working.

 

[Ross]

There are reported issues with drugs manufactured in both India and China and being imported into the US. Apparently in the past, the FDA didn't do a very good job of inspecting these plants. However, more recently, they have rejected drugs from particular plants in both countries and shut down some manufacturing lines.

So how do we protect ourselves? Get regular INR tests to insure that whichever one you are taking is working.

Precisely. The FDA is getting a very rude awakening and things will change. I'm not about to trust my life to an outside countries medications that I must take daily.

 

[lance]

Lance,

If you look at the actual pharmaceutical name for Coumadin, it is Warfarin sodium. I get my meds from right here in the USA and plain as day on the info sheet it says warfarin sodium.

Hello Christy,
My warfarin labels read "warfarin sodium" too.
Chow Dou Fu mention "sodium" without including warfarin in the translation.
When asked what meds I take by a "new" doctor I refer to "warfarin sodium" and am constantly surprised when doctor refers to it as Coumadin. Go figure

 

[lance]

Foreign ingredients in warfarin sodium

Foreign ingredients in warfarin sodium

When there was a media report about bacteria contaminated heparin killing patients I started a thread about me experiences with chinese ingredients in warfarin sodium. I contacted by e-mail I think Genco and Taro and specifically asked about Chinese content. Simply yes they did import from China or no they did not import from China. I didn't accept as gospel anything like, well our warfarin is thoroughly tested. I'll have to check my old e-mails, hopefully I still have it when one supplier denied including ingredients from China. I take Taro so it was probably Taro. That was some time ago and circumstances may have changed.