Online pharmacy is a pharmacy that can be done through the Internet. In other words, the medication is requested and received via the Internet. The main purpose of the online pharmacy is to sell prescription or licensed drugs.
This is advantageous for patients because they can recieve medicines online, without going to the drug stores. The transaction of money and medicine is done throught the Internet and the product is sent to the patient, so there is no need for travel and its travel cost. In addtion, this is especially beneficial for those who are ill and cannot get out of their homes. Therefore, online pharmacy increases convinience in the patient. On the other hand, this is also advantageous to the sellers because many people use the Internet now days so there will be more customers and their profit will increase.
However, there are also disadvantages and some issues to this. This sytem can only be used by users who have internet connection (equaltity of access). In addition, there are issues of reliability and authenticity on whether the product sent to the patient is the "real" thing that he/she desired. The pharmacy must be reliable in order to sell their product. In addition, there are security and privacy issues because personal accounts will be made in order to participate in this. While there is an increase in popularity of online pharmacies, there is also an increase in scam and spam that are not desired.
What is scam?
Scam generally refers to fraud thats done through the Internet; some use spams in order to do it. It advertises a product with a low price - althought the actual price is much more expensive. In addition, scams may include e-mail messages that have links to illegal websites. This is definitely a crime but it is difficult to identify this it is.
What is spam?
Spams are unsolicited e-mail that is indiscriminantly sent to the others. Spam is generally annoying if they many of them because it takes time to check them and to eliminate them. If these spams pile up, the users account will be full of capacity and the user would not be able to use his e-mail. There is no perfect way of elimininating all spams. However, there are ways in which the number of spams can be reduced. For example, a filter system is a software that will identify whether the incoming software is a spam or an regual e-mail. However, this has a limitation in that not all spams can be filtered because it is done through artificial intelligence. In this decade the number of spams has been exponentially increase and many of these are simply advertisements. The purpose of this spam is to advertise a product (sometimes drugs) or even there may be malware attached to it. This will cost money to the users because they should purchase anti-spam software. It is unethical to do these illegal acts to someone else.
Here is a video that discuss how to avoid spam:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYIQ7N-KrjM
Issues
- The users will be charged with high price product when it is suppose to be much lower
- Time consuming and irritating
- Difficult to distinguish between real e-mail and scam/spam
- Lack in reliability
- It will be a serious health issue if the patient receive the inappropriate medicine and takes it.
- Some patients might purchase drugs that are unnecessary to them
Bibliography
http://www.buzzle.com/articles/online-pharmacies/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail_spam
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