That weird US thing is a fractured healthcare system. You might have your GP, a specialist, and a psychologist, who all work in different offices that use different records system which may or may not have a working level of interoperability.
Chances are, if any of them know about the medications you’re on that they didn’t prescribe, it’s because you self-disclosed on your intake form or told the nurse during intake verbally. This is not necessarily a great way to know for sure, because patients forget things and people write or type or select the wrong thing.
In this system, it’s much more reliable to have all the prescriptions flow down to one endpoint and have someone trained who can see the exact medications and dosages, and that person can then give the patient the relevant information they need at the time of service.
They're supposed to, but they sometimes make mistakes. Pharmacists are supposed to know about the sort of drugs they're selling so they can catch potentially lethal errors.
Doing away with this safety net to.. avoid addressing police overreach directly is a bad idea.
> They're supposed to, but they sometimes make mistakes. Pharmacists are supposed to know about the sort of drugs they're selling so they can catch potentially lethal errors.
Are there any stats for how many potentially lethal errors they actually catch in practice?
I don't know, did you look? I know from personal experience that pharmacists do catch errors, but I have no clue if anybody is keeping statistics on it. I think most issues get resolved with a phone call from the pharmacist to the doctor and it's anybody's guess if that gets recorded in some database somewhere.
I'm struggling to understand the logic in wanting pharmacists to be more ignorant. Even if cops couldn't interrogate pharmacists because they were all blind and dumb, they'd go to local doctors instead. The police are the problem that needs to be addressed.
You made a statement, it is up to you to back it up.
> I know from personal experience that pharmacists do catch errors, but I have no clue if anybody is keeping statistics on it.
Thanks for sharing your experience.
> I'm struggling to understand the logic in wanting pharmacists to be more ignorant.
This is IT security 101 - the less randos have access to a sensitive data the better.
> Even if cops couldn't interrogate pharmacists because they were all blind and dumb, they'd go to local doctors instead.
In context of US situation I guess the benefit if when out-of-state telehealth doctor prescribes and local pharmacy clerks don't have access to those records. The best theoretical end game would be to either have such records on encrypted device owned by patient or none at all.
> The police are the problem that needs to be addressed.
Last decade or so the tendency has been to solve this by technical means, where possible. Like e2e encrypted messages, encrypted iCloud/Google backups, recent announcement of local Google maps timeline, etc.
It's redundancy. Yes, the doctor will check all this prior to prescription, but doctors can and will make mistakes. Having a secondary layer checking as well is going to save a whole lot of lives.
Do you have any numbers to back up the "is going to save a whole lot of lives"? Granted, Ukraine's healthcare system has never been something to write home about, but I don't remember inability of random pharmacy clerk to see your whole healthcare history to cause much trouble. I wonder how this is handled in EU countries.
it gets even better when you consider that pharmacists are allowed to refuse to fill prescriptions here for "moral reasons", or in fact any other reason. C2 scripts are an absolute joy to fill here (/s) because you're constantly dealing with some tinpot dictator at the pharmacy window who is upset you're filling it on the earliest day you're allowed as opposed to waiting for the last day and finding out it's out-of-stock (because of the constant shortages).
the argument is that pharmacists are a "last line of defense" against the fractured system or mistakes from doctors (or clerical errors etc) but their authority is absolutely not limited to correcting errors or double-checking with the doctor's office. In practice the pharmacists here are incredibly full of themselves, they'll refuse to dispense birth control, etc, and there is no duty for the pharmacy to ensure someone else will service you, they can just say "no" and that's it.
