Vets charges £17 for 15 paracetamol

[Messyhair321]

This is normal paracetamol isn't it?
How can vet charge £17 for a box of 15 tablets when I can pop to the chemist & get them for £1. ??!

Where I work we would prescribe them so you have to label for dose and tell you to buy your own. That's quite shocking

Are they for humans? Can you use human ones on pets? £17 is bloody shocking

It's a tricky area legally we are not supposed to tell you what dose to use.
We are supposed to buy them from our wholesaler who has to buy them from a human wholesaler and then package them for the individual animal.
The human wholesalers charge the veterinary wholesalers more than they charge human pharmacies and so the costs stack up.
You should have signed a consent form to use a human product that has to be stored for years to prove that you clearly understood this is not a veterinary medicine. So additional layers of admin and record storage and so it adds up.

We had exactly this situation. When they said they were prescribing paracetamol we assumed they would be a special strength specifically for the right dose and like you it was just regular paracetamol. Bearing in mind the total bill was over £800 we protested and they took it off the bill.

Yes this is human paracetamol, it's just outrageous, the get didn't tell us that we could just buy it ourselves, just referred to 'pain medication'.
We weren't asked to sign anything.
So our dog has cancer & we discovered this on that appointment, this just adds to the upset it really does.
I suspect that it's because we're insured, but honestly there's a line isn't there & morally this can't be right

The same exact brand is £1.20 at the chemist.

We weren't asked to sign anything. No conversation about what these pain meds were, just prescribed them.
Feeling totally fleeced.

Exactly. Completely ripped off. On top of a sick dog we have to put up with vets that aren't straight.
In a recession there's something wholly awful about them doing this sort of thing.

That's nuts! Well I learned today that human and pet paracetamol are the same.

Vets just referred to them as 'pain medication'.
The trouble is, you don't know what they're charging. We also paid £470 for one blood test on the same day. Seems really excessive, and the problem is they know that emotionally you are a wreck if your pet is unwell.
It just adds to the stress of it all.

Apparently, you can, this is what our vet 'prescribed'. Could have just popped around the corner & paid £1.

@Messyhair321 that's terrible to just charge you like that. My vet always gives me the option to buy medication myself if it's cheaper. I don't think they would even sell basic stuff like paracetamol.

We had a pet on long-term medication and the vet was able to give us a prescription so that we could buy it ourselves from an online pharmacy. Maybe you could get a prescription instead ? They can't just tell you I think because then there's no evidence of their recommending it which means their professional insurance doesn't apply.

They charge for the private prescription and that was £15 so maybe they figured it was cheaper for you to just get everything together now. But if your dog is on it long term then prescribing and buying it yourself for £1.20 sounds like the cheaper way to go !!

They gave us 5 days worth, so 15 tablets. There wasn't a prescription as such just the prescribed paracetamol from the vet.
It's just a temporary measure before a hospital appointment for our dog.
I'm absolutely irate I can't tell you.

You’ll no doubt get someone along soon ranting and raving that vets barely make a penny due to their overheads and NEVER rip people off, you always do on these sort of threads. They regularly massively take the piss though, especially if you’re insured like you mentioned. My dog caught mange once and he had to have these baths in some really toxic substance. Cost me £150 a time for these baths on top of the medication. Because it was so toxic the animals are meant to be constantly supervised when it’s on their skin until it gets washed off. I got a phone call one day telling me they were having to keep my dog in because he’d licked all of the medication off himself, he had to have an injection to make him throw up and a tube down his throat and his stomach pumped with liquid charcoal. So he’d clearly been left unsupervised and had to go through traumatic treatment to undo the damage. When I looked through the insurance bill I saw they not only charged them for his treatment they cocked up, but they’d billed them for the treatment they’d given him after they’d poisoned him! And it was only after I refused to let them bath him again they just handed me the bottle and said ‘oh that’s fine, you can just do it at home’. We were over a thousand pounds down in baths by that point when they then decided to inform me I could easily do it myself at home (and a lot more competently).

@blahblahblah1654 not for all pets! It's toxic to cats

On the fence here.

We have been prescribed pardale which is the pet licensed version for paracetamol. It wasnt extortionate though and it was with a mountain of other pills.

But on other occasions when it was a discussion of maybe just give him some painkillers for a couple of days they have told me the dosage for paracetamol rather than charged me for a prescription.

I think it is difficult because it is expensive to prescribe some medication for pets even though it's cheap for the human equivalents.

Good Lord that's insane! I just bought a pack of paracetamol from Lidl for 39p!

When our dog had to stop the pain med she was on our vet told us to use human paracetamol - 1/4 of a regular tablet twice a day ( she was about 10kg)

Having said that prescriptions from the vet always cost an arm and a leg. Our dog had quite a few issues so we got the paper prescription from the vet then bought the meds on line. It was literally 1/4 of the cost had we got it from the vet.

Bit different if you need antibiotics or a medication straight away but for long term stuff it's a no brainer.

Our dog was prescribed paracetamol a few weeks ago and the vet told us to just buy them from the supermarket.

This is where I thank my lucky stars for my vet. One of ours had cancer and she recommended OTC paracetamol, and wrote down the dosage/frequency for me. That was to manage pain in the early days.

Vet then moved us onto Pardale, which is doggy co-codamol and therefore has to be prescribed (and paid for).

But it was useful to know that for minor pain, normal OTC paracetamol can be used.

The dose is important, our vet recently told us we could use 1/2 a 500mg tablet 3 x daily for our 18kg dog when she had an injury but was only for a few days. That is outrageous @Messyhair321 and I think I would complain on principal, just because your dog is insured isn’t an excuse for charging extortionate amounts for things you can easily supply.

That’s outrageous OP and I’m sorry about your dog.
A few years ago now my dog had conjunctivitis; I took her to the vet and they charged £14 for the medicine. I assumed it was a special doggy version that drove up the cost but as I was paying and leaving the vet happily told me it was the same as for humans, ‘isn’t that interesting?’ I was not pleased considering I had a bottle in the fridge that had cost £3 from the Boots across the road!

Legally pharmacies can only sell medication for human use, it's not really an issue with paracetamol as you can buy that in supermarkets but I've had many problems with people asking for piriton and chloramphenicol because their vet has told them to buy it from the pharmacy.

We were quoted £135 for Piriton, they said it’s because it’s licensed for human use rather than animal use. They actually advised us to buy it from a pharmacy instead.

No vet should be advising that P category meds be purchased in a pharmacy for animal use. It's a breach of the product license and the pharmacist is not legally covered if something happens to your pet.