Contributed by William Angelos| 11 August, 2006 20:14 GMT
Doctors are sounding an alarm over the danger of buying drugs on the Internet after a woman's self-prescribed treatment led to severe eye damage. The woman developed cataracts and glaucoma after using steroids she had bought from a company based in Thailand.
Shopping online is a convenience that many people now feel they couldn't do without, but when it comes to making self-diagnoses and purchasing medications on the Web, doctors are warning buyers to beware. They may lose more than the cost of counterfeit drugs.
Some drugs may contain ingredients quite different from the original brand, say UK researchers Scott Fraser and Philip Severn in a letter published in
The Lancet.
Even if the medicines are what they claim to be, they may cause interactions or side-effects that require monitoring by a health professional, they warned.
The physicians gave the example of a 64-year-old woman who purchased prednisolone, an oral steroid, from an online drug company based in Thailand to treat her self-diagnosed case of chronic fatigue syndrome. After taking the medicine for several years, her sight began to fail.
Doctors who examined the woman concluded that the steroids had caused her to develop glaucoma and cataracts. She had no previous history of vision problems, and sight disorders did not run in her family.
The problem in this case, according to Fraser, was that the woman had been taking too high a dose of the medication, and there was no monitoring of side-effects.
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