What Is The Best Generic Version Of Wellbutrin Xl - Watson Or Anchen? (Page 72) (Top voted first)

My doctor will not prescribe generic Wellbutrin XL but my insurance will no longer pay for brand name drugs. I will have to pay about $7000 per yer for what I am taking now (3 of the 150mg Wellbutrin XL brand name per day). I am reading that the problem with the generics is the time release mechanism and not the drug itself and that some are better than others. Anybody have experience with the generics made by Watson and /or Anchen?

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Geminiguy:

Well, of course, I only know what I hear in the media and from friends I have met online who live in the states. One woman told me about how she lost everything she owned because she was in the hospital for 2 months. But from the way it is portrayed on TV, I wouldn't say being on Medicaid is any picnic. If there is any truth to the stuff they show in American medical dramas, like hospitals "turfing" people because they find out they're on Medicaid and they don't want to treat them.

As for the "loses" to the hospitals and doctors from treating people on Medicaid....

I don't know about you but I've never met a poor doctor. Or even a "middle class" doctor. And the amount of money hospitals charge for services I would imagine far exceeds the actual cost of the service. Not to mention the amount that is wasted, and the amount that gets pocketed by greedy administration people. Don't ever believe they can't afford to take a cut.

In Canada, I can tell you from experience, it is no fun being in the poorest class. People say all the same things, about how people on welfare and disability get a free ride and the working people pay to support them....blah blah blah. The truth is that living on welfare/disability is horrendous. I can't imagine anyone doing it just because they are "lazy", as all the rich people like to say. It's even worse when you have a disability that people don't understand or accept, like depression. The therapist I saw last year, for the grand total of 8 sessions that I was allowed, told me that he has never had a patient who applied for disability get approved. I never had the chance to find out because I inherited some money and was automatically disqualified. In order for me or my husband, who is also disabled, to qualify I have to spend every last cent of the inheritance money, and keep all the receipts to prove that I spent it on living expenses only. Then, after we are completely and utterly penniless, with nothing but the clothes on our backs and the one vehicle we are permitted to own, then we can get just enough to pay the rent and buy food, if we're lucky.

Oh yeah, we're living the good life now!

But this is getting way off topic and I am sure that is frowned upon here, as it is in most forums.

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Just because you read info on google, doesn't make it true either, brand name or generic the same chemical ingredient is being used, true they may use different fillers which one could have a negative reaction to, but at the end of the day bupropion is the chemical name, wellbutrin is merely a brand name like pepsi, coca-cola and so on....

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I had lasik about 5 years ago and when I started taking Wellbutrin I had to get glasses. This was the generic Apotex 100 mg. So I am hoping if this problem was because of the generic and I switch to brand name I will get my eyesight back. The timing was a bit odd and I might have to blame it on the generics. A couple questions....if your doctor gives you a higher dose and you happen to have 2 different Wellbutrin types like XL and immediate release can you combine the too to get to the right dosage or is that dangerous? Also I am waiting on a package from a Canadian pharmacy with brand name Wellbutrin. Are those brand name the same? I used canadadrugs. Any thoughts or comments on this? Thank you.

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The fact that your insurance company covers brand Wellbutrin at all tells you there is something wrong with your insurance company to begin with. Many companies won't carry brand at all as a cost savings to those paying the insurance premiums. You may want to contact your insurance company and put in the suggestion for them to cease covering brand Wellbutrin.

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Mylan generic Wellbutrin XL is made in India and that is a problem as the standards in India are highly questionable, to be polite, not to mention unmonitored. In fact, we don't know what standards we are being subjected to but here are a few of the possibilities: unsanitary conditions and methods, extreme heat, vermin, bugs and the use of mystery ingredients for binders and fillers. It's ANYONE'S GUESS as to WHAT is in those drugs, and how well they actually work. The pills could have been sitting around in an open bin in a 100 degree heat where flies are laying their eggs.

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I've had good success with generic Wellbutrin scripts, but now that I think about it, I probably illegally referred my patients to a local pharmacy where I get my scripts. Known the owner for years. Has the Pharma knows his stuff. He's very successful, because he only stock the best quality (according to Valid and Reliable Research reports) generics He's called me about the best generic Xanax; called one of my buds about Oyxcodone and ended up stocking only ENDOCET, the generic for PERCOCET made by the same company with the same ingredients and on the same pill presses. Sometimes, I forget to specific a manufacturer when I know he's getting the script. I also took Wellbutrin XL generic myself — it was the Sandoz generic, I'm pretty sure and performed true to form. I was under a lot of pressure and my own shrink, the grand old man of psychiatry in my part of this state, asked about Suicidal ideation or gestures. I mentioned that "I'D RATHER DIE THAN than teach "those dumb little entitled mother******s one more day again" (my hospitals are affiliated with big time med schools. I was volunteered to teach Pharmacology 101 because I have a PhD in Pharmacology). WE sat quietly and he said that considering my entire history (he's known me for years; I'm one of these little entitled bastards, only I worked for my entitlements), he wants me to start Wellbutrin. It worked fine, but I became concerned about the seizure risk. We stepped down the dose and replaced it with Prozac and Effexor-XR. I did have an MDE, by the way; you would think for once, he could be wrong! However, the generic did what it's supposed to do. I THINK it was a Sandoz generic.

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LM: You think USA manufacturing is "clean"? Let me tell you a story about a little company called Blue Bell Ice-cream. You may have heard of them.

Lysteria was recently detected in Blue Bell's ice-cream, which resulted in the death of three people. The cause was contamination in the plant, and it turned out that all of their plants were contaminated.

In their public apology, management claimed that they "had always acted in the best interests of their consumers." This was an outright lie. Plant employees had been complaining about unsanitary conditions for years, including: melted ice-cream pooling on the floors; roof leaks resulting in flooding; oil, condensation and paint chips dropping into mixing barrels; dirty machinery; re-using cardboard shipping sleeves for 6-7 months. There was so much water in the plant at times that the whole place fogged up and you couldn't see anything! When they repeatedly brought up complaints, these same employees were told to "quit b****ing".

Eight million gallons of ice-cream were destroyed, the plants closed and the company would have gone backrupt if it weren't for a white knight investor a few months ago.

The moral of the story is this: food and drug safety comes from government regulation, which in America means the FDA. It doesn't come from plant operators, no matter where they are in the world.

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Clearly, your reply has all the sting of someone who cannot resist ad hominem attacks. I know full well what I am talking about. I am a retired executive with a Fortune 100 Company. I've handled more business than you will ever see in a life-time. the American model is unstable and unsustainable. Catastrophic Risk pools aside, there is NOTHING affordable about using the IRS to literally force Americans to pat $3,000+/yr of take home money, to "save money" as a "low cost plan" to pay for the breeding public - it's Socialism and Alinsky on steroids. Your brightr ideas are killing State budgets and have ONLY driven costs up. No citizen (except the usual group) is getting anything more than more of the same ole same ole. You avoided the Food Shopping analogy because you know I'm right . Your ilk can't come up with a legitimate argument to counter it. Go home.

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Thank You Paul. Tired of the same thing. Can you debate each other privately please?

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That's fine, it's just the arguing back and forth is unhelpful and stressful

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A slight correction, Eric. The 150mg dose was evaluated -- by Teva and everyone else -- at the time that the original generics were engineered. The time release mechanisms were close enough to equivalent for the 150mg dose. At the time that Wellbutrin was invented, it was believed that the time-release didn't matter. The mechanism was believed to be that you take the drug every day and it takes a few weeks for your blood levels to rise to a level that is therapeutic. If you read your patient information packet, they still tell you to expect that the drug will work that way. The only reason that they added a time-release to the pill was that they discovered a small-but-real risk of seizure, so this was an add-on to reduce the seizure risk without changing (what was believed to be) the underlying action of the drug.

When a drug goes generic, they evaluate generics against brand by recruiting healthy volunteers and giving them the drug and then analyzing their blood at 1 hour, 4 hours, etc. and measure how the generic drug gets taken up and how the brand gets taken up. Notice the term "healthy volunteers" -- these are NOT patients who need and benefit from the drug. Because of the seizure risk, which rises as the dose rises, and because they thought that only the total amount of drug mattered and that the time release was just a safety thing, they didn't evaluate the 300mg.

All of this was completely reasonable based upon the completely reasonable assumptions that they were making.

Teva and Watson both took the 150mg off the market when the 300mg was shown to be different. The reason that they did this is that they are hypersensitive to their reputation, litigation and political attacks, and the different effects between 150 and 300 is too subtle a distinction when the risks to the companies are that high. So the next time you are launching into a frothing rant about evil pharmaceutical companies and FDA conspiracies, remember that these are not harmless. I would be much happier to be spending $6/month on Teva or Watson 150mg generics than $50/month on brand.

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lucy: "I was told the brand name medication maker has a patent on the skin covering the tablet that allows the meds to be released in your system over a period of time"

No, that's not quite it. It's that medication patents don't include the time-release mechanism in the patent at all. Each manufacturer has it's own trade-secret recipe for doing time-release coatings. All of the manufacturers have been tested, and they all do the time release at pretty much the same rate now. When the generics first came out, only the 150mg were tested for dosage over time, but now the 300mg have been tested too. All of the remaining generics have the same release profile as name brand.

Also, IF the very subtle remaining differences in the coating matters, and that's a huge IF, then it's completely possible that one or more generic could be BETTER than brand name.

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Direct Sucess Pharmacy will give you a coupon and run it with or without insurance for brand name Wellbutrin! Copay is $100. I rather pay that then take the horrible generic.

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The explanation that I have heard about the time-release mechanism is that it is not patented, but a trade secret to each manufacturer. (In a patent, a company files a very detailed instruction manual to making a patented device, which is public, and they get exclusive rights to use it for some time period, but when the patent expires then everybody has a detailed instruction manual for duplicating it. A trade secret is simply secret, and stays secret as long as the company manages to keep it secret.)

As for generics "not working" and various other conspiracy theories, that's just nonsense. Every generic manufacturer WANTS their $30/month drug to work exactly like the $1,500/month drug, because if their drug works they get $30/month and Valeant gets $0, but if their drug doesn't work then THEY get $0. When I first went on the Teva generic 150XL it was nothing short of a miracle. The internet is full of tens of thousands of us who experienced that miracle, and who are paying $30/month or a lot less if insurance is paying a chunk. The specific problems that specific people are having with specific generics must have to do with specific ways in which some people's bodies vary from average.

There is a huge group of people who have gotten their lives back with these generic drugs which are very cheap. Stop saying that the FDA should screw us all over by taking them off the market.

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Cathy is totally wrong. Cathy seems content with popping inferior pills and hoping for a placebo effect. Sorry, Cat, but generic Wellbutrin is NOT comparable to the brand. CASE IN POINT: TEVA'S VERSION. I've taken it. I always felt jittery on it. Turns out, the ingredients were not timed release, rather being dumped out at once or something along those lines. TEVA voluntarily pulled its crappy drug off the market before the FDA got even more involved. Brand name Wellbutrin XL 300 mg is "gentle." Perhaps you should look for better health insurance.

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JJ, what is NONSENSE is the idea that the generic manufacturers have deliberately created an inferior product when it is within their power to create a product that works the same as brand name. They DESPERATELY WANT their product to be as good, because that's how they get paid!

Also, NOBODY KNOWS whether the generics are inferior, or just different. It may very well be that some fraction of the patients who are doing great on the generic would do WORSE on the brand name. But NOBODY is going to do that experiment, because who would pay $1500/mo when $30/month is working great? It is certainly true that real brand name Wellbutrin doesn't work very well with some people's brains and some people's depression, which is why there are lots of other drugs out there and lots of people taking them instead of buproprion. There are people out there who started on Wellbutrin back when it was new before any generics, it didn't work well for them, and so they tried something else and it worked better. Some of those people might do better on generic buproprion than on Wellbutrin. Some might do better on generic buproprion than on whatever antidepressant they ended up taking. But because of how medicine works, there is very little chance that they would even try generic buproprion after name-brand Wellbutrin didn't work for them.

We can observe different things with our individual experiences, but there is no one out there doing the rigorous and controlled studies that would allow us to understand what is really going on. Yes, there are some things that we can say we know -- like "generic buproprion doesn't relieve depression as well as brand name Wellbutrin for some people" -- but more than that we just don't know. We don't know how many people that is, just that it's more than zero. We don't know if there are any people where generic would work better. And we certainly don't know the CAUSE of the difference.

It's also POSSIBLE that the difference is caused by something that would totally surprise everyone. Maybe the shape of the pill matters? Maybe it's the minute quantity of the specific black dye which is used to print the Wellbutrin name on the pill?

And it is absolutely possible that the placebo effect matters. After all, this disease literally is "all in my head"! The very last thing I would want to do is to have to spend a hefty mortgage payment level price every month because I talked myself into name brand being better when it's not better for me.

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I may be the only one that prefers generic Actavis over brand Wellbutrin. My very first Rx 6 years ago was filled with generic and that's what I've been taking ever since. Last week I reached my deductible for insurance so that meant my copay for medication would cost me a lot less. For the first time I requested brand Wellbutrin it still cost $78. vs $5. (for Actavis) but I wanted to see what the brand was like. To be honest, I'm not sure I like it. I can't sleep at night, even taking medication to help with sleep. I should say that I take the SR 200 mg twice a day (at breakfast and dinner). Maybe there is more stimulant in it, I don't know. Also, initially taking bupropion (Actavis) I lost weight, about 5-6 lbs and on brand Wellbutrin for some reason (even with more stimulant) I feel hungry all the time. So after 3 days on brand I went back to generic Actavis. Has anyone experienced something similar.

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"Respectfully Geminiguy-If it "is what it is" & you're not crying about it, (guess you were w/ your financial hardship going from BUDEPRION to Wellbutrin which is BUPROPION), & you've found your attempts to educate others on what you believe futile......WHY are you here? Just askin'"

To specifically answer your question, I only came back because I liked cathyf's post and wanted to complement her on it. But look no further than the post of the person below who doesn't have a clue that TEVA Budeprion worked well for thousands of people even though it's been posted many times on this site and other sites. And after cathyf and I say the same thing about TEVA Budeprion now someone else will come along who also doesn't have a clue about the success of TEVA Budeprion and post the same thing. This is the futility I'm talking about.

"CASE IN POINT: TEVA'S VERSION. I've taken it. I always felt jittery on it. Turns out, the ingrediants were not timed release, rather being dumped out at once or something along those lines. TEVA voluntarily pulled its crappy drug off the market before the FDA got even more involved."

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TY Crosbysmom for your (always) specific info!
And who is "downvoting" these comments? Contribute SOMETHING relevant to the current topic or GO AWAY !!
Why would you hang around reading this "banter" if you've nothing to contribute?

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Well, I haven't tried the brand name, but both generics I've tried have worked for me, but I think the Watson is more effective. I have Express Scripts and went to Walgreens until they stopped taking that insurance the first of this year. I was getting generic manufactured by Mylan there. I switched to the Target pharmacy and got the Watson brand from them and at first I think it was more effective, but both definitely worked. My insurance requires me to pay $10 for generics and half of the cost for brand names, so I don't ever get brand names.

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