iPump, Inc.

Back to Basics:  An Innovative Approach to Patient Assistance

My name is Jim McMahon and I am the administrator for the nonprofit Slash Drug Costs website (www.slashdrugcosts.org/forum/index.php).  We have the simple mission of bringing down the costs of prescription and over the counter drugs for consumers.  This is accomplished by giving a place for people to share their methods of reducing overall medication costs and directly answering requests for help from anyone.

We are young but I think we have been very successful.  There are hundreds of posts to help people on our website.  We have two areas where people can ask for specific help based upon their individual problems.  We have drastically cut the costs for everyone who has requested such help.

Unlike other online resources that help people obtain needed medications, we do not discriminate against anyone based on their income, assets, or whether they have insurance.  Our services are completely free to anyone.  We present reasonable methods to reduce costs that patients can discuss with their doctors.  People should not be required to be poverty stricken just to get the medications they need.

My father was type 1 diabetic who got it when he was a teenager.  He took as good of care of himself as was possible in the late 1930’s until he died from complications at age 42.  In those days you had to use inaccurate urine test strips and did not have the range of insulins and medications that are available today.  He never had a bad infection but he did go blind a few years before he died.

I used to be one of those people who never required medications and never thought I would.  I took good care of myself.  Watching my father slowly degrade taught me to watch my diet and have blood sugar tests done every three months.  I thought I was safe.  Unfortunately I settled into the common desk job lifestyle that included little exercise.

Nine years ago I got results showing I had become a type II diabetic.  I did not want medications for it so I tightened my diet and started exercising.  Over the next four months my blood sugar readings averaged 123 and I thought I had it licked.

I get my medical treatment at Veteran’s Administration Hospitals (VA).  There I was given Cyproheptadine for an off-label experimental use and it appears my islet cells were killed.  After 5 days I became a brittle insulin dependent diabetic and no diabetic medications helped.  I have had no sign of internal insulin production since.  I searched the internet and found Dr. Lawrence Fisher, a prominent diabetes researcher, who had used that drug to induce diabetes in test animals for a number of his studies.  I contacted him.  He told me that large amounts of Cyproheptadine should never be given to a person.  I connected my local doctor with Dr. Fisher.  The VA quickly stopped experimenting with Cyproheptadine in that fashion.

The Islets of Hope website (www.isletsofhope.com) was the first place where I found information about Latent Autoimmune Diabetes in Adults (LADA).  My symptoms make it seem likely that is what I had before the administration of Cyproheptadine 9 years ago.  It might explain why several people before me got the experimental treatment using Cyproheptadine without inducing insulin-dependent diabetes.

Since then I have had great difficulty controlling my blood sugars even though I have tried every combination of insulin available.  My diabetes has caused problems to flare that I never even knew I had.  The result is that I am now very uncomfortable with the large number of medications I require.

My wife, who also requires a lot of expensive medications, began researching on drug interactions and cost reduction methods in order for both of us to remain safe and be able to stay on the medications we needed.  At this same time, our aging parents were requiring more and more expensive medications.  The amount of research we personally had to do to find the most affordable and safe methods to save was becoming overwhelming.  Various health care professionals helped us accrue a pretty huge amount of knowledge about reducing costs.

We found other people with the same problem and together we shared our methods of saving money with each other.  The nonprofit Slash Drug Costs Organization was not even an idea until the fall of 2006.  We realized that if we could help each other reduce medication costs then it would be wonderful to share this knowledge to help others.  It was easy to see that if more people added their knowledge then the extra ideas would reduce costs further and help even more people.

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