Extraordinarily cheap drug prices from an Egyptian online pharmacy

[Hip]

I just came across an Egyptian online pharmacy called Gardenia Pharmacy whose drug prices are extraordinarily cheap, around 5 to 15 times cheaper than the already cheap prices you find in Indian generic online pharmacies! Gardenia's website has an option to view it in English.

Here is a price comparison table for some pharmaceuticals used in ME/CFS, comparing prices at Gardenia Pharmacy to the prices at two well-known Indian pharmacies, Buy Pharma and All Day Chemist.

Drug	Dose	Quantity	Gardenia Pharmacy	Buy Pharma	All Day Chemist
Pyridostigmine (Mestinon)	60 mg	150	$11	$90	$92
Valganciclovir (Valcyte)	450 mg	60	$162	$665	$450
Valaciclovir (Valtrex)	1000 mg	10	$5	$30	$21
Naltrexone	50 mg	30	$6	$87	$71
Aripiprazole (Abilify)	15 mg	30	$2	$32
Tenofovir	300 mg	30	$10	$74	$53

Valcyte in particular is nearly 3 times cheaper than the already very cheap All Day Chemist price. Valcyte is normally an expensive undertaking, given that the daily dose costs about $15 at the ADC price. So buying Valcyte at Gardenia would make this therapy more affordable.

However, one difficulty in obtaining drugs from Gardenia Pharmacy is that they do not ship internationally, they only ship to the Egyptian domestic market. But this limitation might be overcome by using a shopping forwarding service, which will provide you with a free mailing address in Egypt to send your shopping to, and will forward your shopping purchases to your address in your own country. Two such Egyptian parcel forwarding services are www.reship.com and www.shippn.com/en/. Though one would need to check their terms and conditions to ensure they can forward pharmaceuticals.

The other issue is that is that Gardenia Pharmacy say to upload a prescription in order to buy drugs. But I consulted AI on this, and apparently in practice, prescription requirements in Egypt can be lax for non-controlled medications, and many pharmacies in Egypt routinely dispense various prescription medications without asking for a prescription. So it may be that Gardenia Pharmacy will not demand a prescription.

Another Egyptian pharmacy with cheap prices is Egyptian Drugstore. However, this is not as cheap, and it has more limited stock. There is also Bloom Pharmacy, but their stock is even more limited.

 

[szrk]

Another alternative to those website based Indian pharmacies is an Indiamart seller with good reviews. They're usually between 2 and 10 times cheaper and I've actually found them to be more reliable. For instance I paid $15 USD a tube for microsphere tretinoin (not CFS related) from the cheapest website seller with stock and they sent me a different non-microsphere product in a different concentration. This was a popular website that I'm sure has been mentioned here before. I then paid $2 USD a tube on Indiamart for a product that actually arrived. The difference is less marked for more expensive pharmaceuticals though. It's not too difficult to order, you just talk to someone over text to get a price and use a bank transfer or cryptocurrency to pay. The main issue I have is being absolutely hounded on WhatsApp as the site likes to hand your phone number out to random sellers for terms you search.

 

[Hip]

Another alternative to those website based Indian pharmacies is an Indiamart seller with good reviews. They're usually between 2 and 10 times cheaper and I've actually found them to be more reliable.

Yes, I seen the very low prices on www.indiamart.com, and have often been tempted to buy there.

The trouble with Indiamart though is that there are reports of lots of counterfeit pharmaceuticals being sold.

If you choose an Indiamart seller with good reviews, that might mitigate the risk of getting fakes (however buyers providing the reviews may not have any means to check whether the drugs they bought contain the right active ingredient).

 

[szrk]

The trouble with Indiamart though is that there are reports of lots of counterfeit pharmaceuticals being sold.

The question to me is whether the risk is actually significantly higher than it is for the online shopfront based Indian pharmacies or even for domestic indian pharmacies. Counterfeit medication and poor quality control are major problems in India generally, so it doesn't necessarily say much about the largest Indian international pharmaceutical resale platform itself. Maybe those problems are worth the trade for living in a country with 200mg MR tapentadol available OTC : P (that's equivalent to a high dose of around 60mg of morphine).

I would suggest anyone does some research on brands before buying any Indian pharmaceuticals. For instance rapamycin.news forum members did some lab testing and found most Indian brands to match the expected dose but one brand was worryingly underdosed.

 

[Hip]

The question to me is whether the risk is actually significantly higher than it is for the online shopfront based Indian pharmacies

Many online prescription-free pharmacies in India or Asia selling generic drugs, such as those listed in the first post of this pharmacies thread, have been in business for many years, decades in some cases, so they have a reputation to maintain. Thus it would not be in their interests to sell fakes. I think it is this desire to protect reputation that makes them reliable.

Though I would not be so trustful of an online pharmacy that had only been around for a year.

There are also some prescription-free pharmacies like goldpharma.com who are based in Europe and sell generic drugs manufactured by European pharmaceutical companies, for people who are wary about Indian-manufactured generics.

 

[szrk]

Many online prescription-free pharmacies in India or Asia selling generic drugs, such as those listed in the first post of this pharmacies thread, have been in business for many years, decades in some cases, so they have a reputation to maintain. Thus it would not be in their interests to sell fakes. I think it is this desire to protect reputation that makes them reliable.

One of the pharmacies in that list, cheapmedicineshop, sent me the completely wrong brand, formulation type and strength of tretinoin and refused to refund me or reship the correct one. They had both the one I purchased and the one they sent listed, the one I purchased cost about 5x as much. If they don't care about bad reviews from a practice that blatant it's hard to imagine they care about fake pharmaceuticals when buyers are so unlikely to get expensive lab testing. Who is going to trust to a review from one person who feels like their medication isn't working?

The other issue is counterfeit medication is a problem at the level of pharmaceutical wholesalers in India, so the pharmacy may not even be aware the medication is not legitimate.

Can strongly recommend goldpharma though, I still take the risk on ordering from India for most things given the often enormous cost disparity but it's great to have the option for things like aripiprazole liquid. Ultimately for a somewhat scattered approach with trying medication that probably won't work I'm not that concerned about a <10% chance the pills are underdosed or contain no API. Haven't heard of counterfeit non-abusable indian medication actually containing something notably dangerous, usually just it containing nothing or very little of the medication (not that that isn't also dangerous in a different sense).

Inhousepharmacy in Vanuatu sells western branded/manufacturered medication that I believe is significantly less likely to be counterfeit because they're also the oldest and largest of the major intl pharmacies. It's unfortunate Chinese international pharmacies don't really exist. If you know someone in China who can reship it's often very easy to get drugs without a script there. If you need a lot of something or something special and/or expensive made-in-china can be fantastic for raw APIs, but that's not really something for this forum.

 

[Hip]

One of the pharmacies in that list, cheapmedicineshop, sent me the completely wrong brand, formulation type and strength of tretinoin and refused to refund me or reship the correct one. They had both the one I purchased and the one they sent listed, the one I purchased cost about 5x as much. If they don't care about bad reviews from a practice that blatant it's hard to imagine they care about fake pharmaceuticals when buyers are so unlikely to get expensive lab testing. Who is going to trust to a review from one person who feels like their medication isn't working?

That sounds unprofessional on the part of cheapmedicineshop.

Regarding the effect of buyers posting pharmacy reviews online: I tend to think this might keep pharmacies in check. When I first started buying from prescription-free pharmacies about 20 years ago, my impression is that people got ripped off more often by pharmacies back then than they do today. Pharmacy credit card fraud, and drugs not arriving after a large order was placed, were more common many years ago.

In fact the business model of ADC 20 years ago seemed to involve supplying legitimate drugs, but also randomly selecting some customers for credit card fraud. Credit card fraud was just a hazard of ordering from ADC. Whereas these days, ADC seems to run a cleaner operation. The proliferation of websites where disgruntled buyers can write critical reviews may have caused pharmacies to become more honest.

 

[MartinK]

Do we have any member from Egypt and do we know if these pharmacies are legit, considering such low prices?

 

[Hip]

Do we have any member from Egypt and do we know if these pharmacies are legit, considering such low prices?

Gardenia Pharmacy looks pretty legit, because it is a group of six bricks and mortar pharmacies, whose street addresses are given at the bottom right of this page.