Everyone wants to save money, and the good news is that purchasing medicine online is both easy and affordable. This is because online pharmacies have a much lower overhead expenses.. The US Pharmacopeia (USP) has joined forces with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) together with the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy (NABP) has established quality control standards for all medications dispensed by pharmacies throughout United States. Their intention is to prevent consumers from receiving poor quality and/or harmful medicines from online pharmacies.

US Pharmacopeia (USP), Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and National Association of Boards of Pharmacy offer these ten tips to consumers who are thinking of buying health products online:

1. Do not purchase from an illegal website. This means putting yourself at risk. The danger of you being able to purchase contaminated or counterfeit product is there, aside from the fact that you may also be given the wrong product, an incorrect dose or worse yet, you could not receive any product at all since most illegal web sites do not maintain longevity.

2. Purchasing an unsafe or inappropriate medication may put you at risk or cause serious health consequences.

3. Obtain prescriptions from your doctor before purchasing drugs online. Moreover, it is not a good idea to purchase a prescription drug online without seeing first your doctor even if you fill out a health-probing questionnaire. The questionnaire does not provide sufficient information that would enable a doctor to determine if that drug is safe for you to use, if another treatment is more appropriate, or if you have an underlying medical condition which could be negatively affected by the drug you are about to purchase.

4. Always try to consult a doctor before using any medication for the first time. This way you can thwart any negative side-effects that the medicine might cause you.

5. Avoid sites that offer to prescribe a prescription drug for the first time without a physical exam, sell a prescription drug without a prescription, or sell drugs that are not approved by Food and Drug Administration. Taking drugs without any physical check up can be harmful to your health and may even cause death.

6. Do not buy from a web site that does not have any access to a registered pharmacist that can answer questions.

7. Avoid sites that don’t contain information about the owner of the site and do not provide a street address and phone number to contact should problems arise.

8. If possible, refrain from purchasing from foreign web sites because generally it is illegal to import drugs from these sites and the risks you are facing are much greater. You could actually be held personally liable for importing this drug.

9. Be very careful in dealing with sites that claim that they have found a new cure for a certain serious disorder and offer quick cure-alls for a wide range of ailments. Likewise, stay away from sites that include undocumented case histories claiming remarkable results.

10. Beware of sites that make use of impressive sounding medical terminology to disguise their lack of research or those that claim that the government, the medical profession, or research scientists have conspired to suppress a products in spite of the effectiveness of the product to cure serious diseases. And if you want to be sure that you are purchasing from a licensed online pharmacy you may check out the site with the VIPPS and see whether it is a licensed pharmacy with good standing.