- This topic has 28 replies, 16 voices, and was last updated 14 years, 5 months ago by
.
-
Posts
-
Hi all,
I have been taking Teva Minocycline for my RA for the past 2 years and have had pretty good results. I just found out that the CVS in my area no longer carries the Teva brand and has switched to Ranbaxy.
I have never heard of this brand before, and now I'm panicking a little at the thought of switching to this. Does anyone know anything about this brand?
Many thanks!!
hmm my pharmacy (walgreens) switched my brand too. i guess as long as its brand and states its minocin and peltized it should be ok.
I'm very happy with my buylowdrugs name brand mino. It's a great price, they send you it in a bottle of 100 for about $135.00 Quick delivery, and really nice on the phone.
Jenn
Thanks everyone.
I don't think the Tivo minocycline is pelletized, but it had been working fine for me. I wish I could afford brand name mino, but unfortunately, I can't spend $135 for a 50 day supply when I can just spend $5 / month with my insurance (it doesn't cover brand name Minocin, sadly).
Is it ok for me to continue taking generic even if it is not pelletized? Will adding bromelain to my regimin make it more effective?
🙂
I guess not. I take it 3xs a week so it lasts me about 33 weeks.
Maybe if you ever go down in doses it would be a solution for you.
Jenn
Serenity,
I take my antibiotics with 500mg bromelain and according to http://www.rheumaticsupport.net/index.php?datafile=faqs.php it “helps potentiate an antibiotic as the Bromelain has some of these blood thinning properties so the antibiotic can now reach its target.”
My first several months I was on Ranbaxy and then the Pharmacy switched to Watson. I found the Watson to be easier on my stomach, but things have been improving all along so I guess they all work, for me anyway.
I read generic Minocin made by Lederle is the same as brand name Minocin except the color and the price. I called CVS, they said they don't carry Lederle brand. Any one uses this brand and where you get it?
JB
Hi All I have used ranbaxy minocycline for more then 3 years and I am doing great. I also used watson and globle which work well too but never had teva. The best to all….. Joe
[user=266]JBJBJB[/user] wrote:
I read generic Minocin made by Lederle is the same as brand name Minocin except the color and the price. I called CVS, they said they don't carry Lederle brand. Any one uses this brand and where you get it?
Hi JB,
On the Mercola site, there is this info:
http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2002/07/03/minocin.aspx
[font=”Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif”]At this link (you have to register to open it), Mercola explains that Lederle 'was' the manufacturer of both brand Minocin and generic minocycline. When they owned the patent for brand Minocin, the generic they produced was supposedly equal in every sense to the brand, except in price. [/font]
However, things changed when “Wyeth Ayerst purchased the Lederle company and Wyeth's ESI Division made the minocycline”. “After Wyeth took over the patent for brand Minocin, they “decided to stop manufacturing the generic version of Minocin which was previously the only acceptable generic.”
[font=”Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif”]Mercola adds that “For now it appears that they (Wyeth) will continue to produce Minocin which is great news as there were rumors that it would be stopped since it competed with Wyeth's own RA drug”.[/font]
Hope this helps to explain the situation – in short, Wyeth bought Lederle. After doing so, they stopped manufacturing the generic and raised the price of brand Minocin, which was in direct competition with Wyeth's RA drug.
Peace, Maz
As long as it's pelletized, it should be okay, right?
Thanks, Maz, in advance for the information. Very informative!
[user=266]JBJBJB[/user] wrote:
As long as it's pelletized, it should be okay, right?
Pelletized has been said, by BB users here, to be superior for those with scleroderma and reflux, as there is less chance of esophageal burning. It is also thought to have better absorption (easier on the stomach/gut) with its slower release properties and contains no fillers to which some are allergic.
One thing you could try is to ask your doctor about these properties to see if he would agree to prescribe “Wyeth Brand Name Minocin Only” stating these specific reasons in order to get your insurance carrier's approval. Others here may be able to share how they managed to get approval.
That said, there are many here who do very well on the non-pelletized generics (pills or powdered capsules) and have had no problems, too. So, this is a very individual thing.
In my own case, I had very severe RA and, being new to all this and not wanting to waste any time, I just went ahead and bought my Stiefel Brand pelletized Minocin (distributed by Wyeth and is exactly the same as the one in the US, just a different colored capsule) from buylowdrugs. I felt it was worth the investment, though I can't say I even gave generics a try. 😉
Peace, Maz
I use pelleted brand Minocin because I need to split my capsules for the MP. Pelleted is way easier to split than powdered Minocycline. Otherwise I pay no attention to brand vs. generic. One of the responders to this forum is a PhD in pharmacology and he swears that the brand and generic are the same. I know the guy and believe him. As a counter point, I recall or think I recall in Scammell's book that rarely, not as a rule, the difference between responding and not responding was brand vs. generic. I get my brand Minocin from http://www.Buylowdrugs.com for a good price. If I couldn't import price controls from Canada I would happily buy generic from Costco. I just don't like splitting powder vs. pellets.
Maz's point about going with brand has sound logic behind it. It takes months, sometimes more than a year to realize that AP is working. If you are new to AP and you ache and hurt everywhere and you have your doubts about it, would you really give it a new try in 8 months with the brand drug or would you give up and try a biologic or other DMARD? I responded brilliantly to generic Doxy, (and then switched to Mino because doc was now convinced and relented) but I wonder if I would have abandoned AP if I hadn't.
john
Maz,
While I could be wrong on this (my wife claims I am often wrong about almost everything) I think the deal on Minocin goes something like this:
1) Some time ago Lederle came up with a pelitized version of miniocycline called Minocin that proved superior to then existing brands of this drug because of better availability to the body and they sold it for a “reasonable” price. Try as I might I've been unable to find the actual market entry retail price of this drug but I have been told it was “reasonable”…whatever that means.
2) The Bean Counter Boys at Wyeth noticed that Minocin was a highly effective and reasonably priced alternative to their often dangerous and very costly RA drugs so in the best spirit of Corporate America they simply bought the rights to produce it from Lederle and … drum roll please … immediately ceased producing the more reasonably priced but nonetheless identical generic version of Minocin.
3) Alas, when even this failed to dampen down sales of Minocin the folks at Wyeth followed Microsoft's example and simply moved to cease production of Minocin in any form whatever. (Ever wonder what happened to the products of those small companys bought up by Microsoft?)
4) The story line gets a bit hard to follow at this point but near as I've been able to discover when a number of RA specialists throughout the USA got wind of Wyeth's plans to discontinue producing this very safe and effective medication they dropped Wyeth a note threatening a class action lawsuit if the company continued with their plans to cease production of Minocin.
5) Tail temporarily between their legs, Wyeth responded to this threat by dropping plans to cease production of Minocin and began, instead, to increase the retail price of the drug to make it less affordable and therefore less of a threat to their more profitable drugs. (In fairness I should mention here that the production of antibiodics at this point in time is a very “iffy” proposition profit wise due to a good many complex factors. Thus support for antibiodic production lessens.)
6) When even this measure failed to dampen market demand for Minocin they began looking around for a new “safe” approach to trashing the drug in hopes of reducing market erosion of their more profitable although far more dangerous and less effective RA meds.
In truth from this point on all I can really offer is conjecture as I've been unable to find the time to dig into the matter further. I do know, however, that Wyeth eventually sold rights to produce Minocin to a group out on the West Coast. If memory serves a post on this site once indicated that this new outfit shifted the market focus of Minocin away from the RA market into the Teen Age Acne Market, jacking up the price even further in the process.
Thus today a once reasonably priced and highly effective RA medication is currently retailing at the pharmacy where I buy my stuff for the incredible price of nearly $10 a capsule!
That is correct, the price for my 90 day supply of Minocin is currently a bit more than $1,700.00 here in America while in Canada the same amount of the very same drug costs around $245…
And “they” say you can save as much as 25% by buying your drugs in Canada? I'm no mathematician, but I sure as heck can do enough math to see that's just a tiny bit more than a 25% savings. In fact, it's more like a 700% savings way I figure.
True, the price for Minocin in Canada has also gone up since I first began buying it there 4 years ago. To whit when I first bought it there it cost around $1.14 a capsule whereas todays it's skyrocketed up to around $1.35 a capsule for an increase of around 16% over 4 years or 4% per year.
Fore you get out the lynching rope for those greedy Canadian so & sos lets take a look at their American counterparts.
When I first began buying Minocin here in the USA 4 years ago it cost around $4.48 a capsule. Today the same drug in the same pharmacy costs $9.67. This means that while the price of brand name Minocin in Canada over the past 4 years has increased by 16%, here in America it has increased by about 218%!
As the saying goes: “The President Is Free To Anybody Who Can Afford To Buy One!” Or was it the press is free…?
Now as to the business about whether or not generic minocycline is as good as Minocin…
There are all sorts of fancy terms thrown around these days in the world of science and one of them is “bioequivalence.”
I will let the good folks at the FDA explain to you what bioequivalence actually means:
“Drug products are considered pharmaceutical equivalents if they contain the same active ingredient(s), are of the same dosage form, route of administration and are identical in strength concentration (e.g., chlordiazepoxide hydrochloride, 5mg capsules).”
While hardly a chemist (Thank the good Lord!) I have spent the past 30 years laboring away in the trenches of science so I am more than a little suspicious of this bioequivelance business. Simply put, to be able to say with even a reasonable amount of confidence that one medication is totally equivalent to another presupposes that the folks doing the comparing know without a shadow of a doubt the precise composition of each of the drugs being compared. And I mean PRECISE not “kind of the same”, etc.
Hate to be the bearer of bad news here, but scientific pretensions of the 21st Century aside we are a long long long long way away from being able to say that we know the PRECISE composition of anything. Thus real scientists working in the real world tend to be very nervous about statements pertaining to bioequivalence
The topic ‘ Is This Brand of Minocycline Reputable??’ is closed to new replies.