pharmacists solely being distributors of pre-ordained medication has no detrimental effects on humans. 🫠 the US is great to its people, and has very good healthcare practices!! (livestream is on the 27th and i am excite, but not involved at all)
https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/2024/fahrplan/talk/ASBXWW/
stream link for those interested:
https://streaming.media.ccc.de/38c3
EDIT: my lack of capitalization and poor word choice has confused people. this event is about making legal, tested for efficacy medication only. pharmacists are good. doctors are good. the cost of medication and other hurdles that prevent people from having access to medication are not.
EDIT 2: i looked into the 4 Theives Vinegar Collective (breifly, just on wikipedia) and i did not realize that they made the EpiPencil, which is an open-source device that injects a mesured dose of epinephrine (a medication that can be bought from a trusted and legal distributor). that’s awesome stuff, but it’s less awesome that they now want to share chemistry knowlege that they don’t necissarily have a full understanding of, and push automated synthesis for people who also don’t have the foundational knowledge to ensure safety. not really great. i guess that’s what happens when healthcare is entirely for-profit, and inaccessable to so many people.
i haven’t had the education to be a pharmacist, but conversations with a few of them has made pretty annoyed for them. there is way more training already than one would expect, but they are doomed to almost exclusively count pills and read off the occasional warning label, essentially. medication interactions, conditions affecting efficacy of specifc meds, and many other factors get offloaded to already overworked doctors. at least the insurers get paid twice, from the doctor visit, and the pharmacy… 🙃
What a mess… Thank you for shining some light on this, really haven’t had much contact with pharmacology! Yeah, I’ve no doubt they could handle all aspects around medication just fine now that I think about it… I imagine they must know more stuff about chems than even the doctors in many cases.
the last bit is almost true, but mainly due to specialization, not training, since they go through the same coursework as each other involving medication. a primary care doctor has to have tons of base knowlege on almost every condition, infection, etc, so the education on chemicals to treat them with gets partly lost to the more relevant-to-role info. i am terrible with names, so even remembering all the preferred specialists to refer patients to would be taking up an unreasonable amount of brain storage space tbh.