PESHAWAR, April 19: Some doctors have adopted a novel way of fleecing patients by prescribing only selected drugs to them, chemists and medical practitioners told this reporter.

They got manufactured drugs with special names, made them available to some chosen chemists and then sent patients to them, said a chemist at the Dabgari Gardens. According to him, poor patients get these drugs at highly exorbitant rates. Many of these medicines did not even carry the necessary details e.g., manufacturing and expiry dates, and price etc., he said.

"Patients are forced to purchase these drugs from the selected stores only," said another chemist. He said a patient was prescribed a drug by a psychiatrist in the city and when he tried to find this item from other chemists than he was referred to, he failed to get it.

"Later, we advised him to get the drug from the store located adjacent to the clinic of the psychiatrist," he said. These kind of doctors not only forced patients to buy their prescribed drugs, but also made them use for long periods.

A chemist near the Lady Reading Hospital (LRH) said a patient came with a prescription from a dermatologist, but the drug was not available in the entire market. Later, he had to buy the tablets from a shop located near the clinic of the dermatologist at Rs300 per tablet. He quoted the patient as saying that he had been using the drug for the past one month, but to no avail.

The chemist said patients could not stop drugs at their own, because they had trust upon these doctors.An orthopaedic surgeon, the chemists near the Khyber Teaching Hospital said, was advising his patients painkillers and antibiotics with strange names. Store-keepers failed to provide the drugs, but a chemist in the same locality had all sort of such drugs prescribed by the surgeon.

Chemists informed that many patients often purchased limited quantity of drugs, thinking that they would buy the rest of the medicines from their villages, but they had to come back to the chosen chemists owing to non-availability of these drugs at their village markets.