Back in the early days of COVID, ‘experts’ advised everyone to have two weeks of everything on hand — including medicine. That’s… a bit difficult to do with prescription meds. Many folks were frustrated with the advice and how useless it was to them.
I’m a small-scale prepper who has been working on getting a month’s worth of medicine on hand for a couple years now. The so-called experts were unreasonable to expect people to get two weeks of prescription meds right away. But with time, it is possible — and a good idea. So I decided to help folks out and wrote a quick thread on ways to get the recommended two weeks of medicine.
I decided it was time to turn that thread into something a little more accessible. So here you go. (This info is specific to the US, but some of it will be helpful to folks elsewhere.)
If you want to be able to have extra meds on hand for emergencies, here are some tips:
1. If you have a good doctor, talk to them.
A doctor can up your dosage for a couple months so you can ‘try’ the higher dose, then ‘decide it doesn’t work’. You squirrel away the extra from the higher dosage.
Your doctor can also call in refills early.
How well this works will depend on your insurance and pharmacy, but if your doctor calls in refills 5 days before they run out ‘to be sure you’re covered’ and you can get them right away, that’s five extra days of medicine you can save.
2. Do you have as-needed medication?
Those are the easiest to save. Every time you don’t need it, take it out of the bottle and put it with your emergency supplies.
3. Most of us aren’t good at taking our medication every day.
Some of us miss often, some only once a month or so. But it happens.
Get one of those weekly or monthly medicine things, or make one yourself.
At the end of the week/month, every dose that you forgot to take goes into emergency supplies.
4. Call your insurance.
Yeah, I’m serious. Many insurers have a policy that they will authorize an extra refill once every year to account for lost, stolen, etc. shit. This is also supposed to cover in case of a natural disaster — you can call and say, ‘My house got flooded, and I lost all my medicine!’ and they’ll get a refill authorized early.
So use that policy, call them, and ask if you can get your refills early. (This includes at least some controlled substances bc we were able to get Lozepam refilled this way once.) Our insurance doesn’t ask why; they check which medicines we want and remind us that we won’t be allowed to request extra refills for 365 days. Others may have different policies.
If you can get the extra refill, the medicines from your prior refill can go into emergency supplies.
Okay, that’s what I’ve got.
But there may be other things you can do.
If you can, talk with your doctor, pharmacist, or caseworker. Tell them you need help getting the recommended emergency supplies; they may have more ideas.
You probably won’t be able to get a supply of ALL your medicines, at least not quickly. But you can get started and get some of them.
The real pain is if your medicine schedule is still in flux. Don’t know how often I’ve finally gotten a month’s worth of one medicine, and then the dosage got changed or it got dropped.
But it can be done.
Good luck! And a final important tip from @gendertreyf@masto.jews.international :
Once you have an emergency supply of medications make sure you use them before they expire. I like to use the old bottle and put the new bottle into the emergency stash every month. That way the meds never get old.