Hey all, welcome back to the real-life pharmacology podcast. I am your host, pharmacist Eric Christensen.

Thank you all so much for listening. Today I'm going to cover Mira Begron. The brand name of this

medication is Mervatrick. And it is important to note that this medication at this time still is a brand name medication.

So whenever you deal with patients that are you need to use or want to use a brand name medication,

you have to have the expectation that it's going to be very expensive.

And in our medical system, it may or may not be

covered by insurance initially. So that's always a big, big challenge. And I think a lot of

healthcare professionals don't understand at least what the cash price for a lot of these

medications are.

So just to give you an example of Mervatrick here as a brand name medication,

the cost ballpark is in the range of $300 to $500 a month.

And so that's substantially significant. And, you know, any patient that's taking

this type of medication, that always has to be part of our assessment. So I just wanted to

lay out that point because it is so important when it comes to patient adherence to recognize that cost plays a huge,

huge role. And depending upon that patient's insurance, how well they're able to afford that

medication, they may be rationing it, they may be skipping days on purpose, they may be

using that in a non-approved or inappropriate way

that might make that medication less effective. So you just have to recognize when you're

working with patients to ask those questions about the cost of medications and if they can afford medications.

So getting over that little rant there, let's get into the pharmacology of the drug

and actually how the drug works.

So it's classification.

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