~~pharmacists solely being distributors of pre-ordained medication has no detrimental effects on humans. ๐ซ 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 think the problem in this case isn't regulation, but that the regulation's being managed by knobheads. I do agree that said regulations must be fair and allow anyone who genuinely needs access to have safe and controlled access, that they should work for the benefit of the people and not the interests of shareholders/lobbyists/string-pullers, yes.
I don't think it'd be a good idea to allow everyone unrestricted access to every medicine under the sun willy-nilly. One such example would be antibiotics, which, while very effective when used appropriately, have been demonstrated to suffer massively from diminishing returns over time. Allowing people to self-medicate with such a substance would just lead to both increases in infections, as well as chemical damage to one's organism.
the constituents' best interest unfortunately doesn't make the senate/congress any money. it would be nice if they had priorites outside making easy money by bending to every corporate lobby.
unrestricted access would be a nightmare. Mexico's strategy of allowing trained pharmacists to dispense basic meds (like a z-pac) seems like a happy medium. seeing a doctor for stuff like that can be expensive and time consuming, and like an excuse for insurance companies to profit.
That's my main problem, that we're not doing much which is in the interest of people, we're mostly just slapping rational-sounding labels on different forms of greed-driven practices. I agree that we need to rethink pretty much everything about medical regulations, if not to change, then to at least ensure that what's there is uncorrupted.
That may be a potential solution, yes! Would most likely require bringing changes to the educational system as well (I'm just assuming, I have no first-hand experience with either studying, or practicing in this domain, but a more robust educational system would solve a lot of problems from the get go) in order to ensure that pharmacists have all the resources possible at their disposal. Or maybe it's just down to perception, one of those "having a custodial job is shameful" preconceptions, like "pharmacists are less reliable than doctors in establishing prescriptions because a doctor's a doctor..." Still working on identifying my biases, I apologise.
Of course, my ideal would be that every single person on this planet have free access to medical care whenever and for whatever reason, so seeing a doctor wouldn't put half of somebody's family tree in debt for a sprained ankle...
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... ๐
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.