It Blows the Mind

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Thursday October 08, 2015 · 5:20 AM PDT

2015/10/08 · 05:20

Perhaps because pharmacists used to actually mix medications and even produce pills they still jealously guard their authority to decide what it is that patients actually need.

Since I've never had a prescription filled for myself, I was incensed the one time getting a prescription filled for my 96 year old mother proved a pain and changed pharmacies on the spot. It didn't occur to me that uncooperative pharmacists might be a wide-spread condition. If it had, I suppose my mind would not be blown by this report out of Florida.

The story in my local paper, which is not yet on line, reads:

"Rule change assumes patients really deserve pain medicine." The News Service of Florida headline is slightly different,

"State Change Could Help Patients Get Pain Medications," and somewhat misleading because it's not the State of Florida that's regulating the behavior of pharmacists. The first three paragraphs of a story that requires a membership request to be read on line provide the gist:

TAMPA| Reacting to pleas from desperate patients unable to get pain medications, the Florida Board of Pharmacy on Wednesday approved a rule change aimed at training pharmacists to change their mindset about prescriptions for controlled substances.
The change switches the rule from a focus on reasons to reject prescriptions for highly addictive narcotics to an emphasis on ensuring that legitimate patients get the medications doctors have ordered.
"Instead of starting out with trying to find a reason to doubt the prescription, you start off with an assumption that everything in the prescription is good, and you work towards achieving patient access," Florida Pharmacy Association Executive Vice President Michael Jackson said after the unanimous vote Wednesday morning.

I suppose I could rejoice that, in another arena, the presumption of probity wins out, but the extent to which purveyors/middlemen have managed to impose rules and regulations to promote their own interests and remove liability boggles the mind.

Note that it is the victims of this over-reaching by the purveyors of drugs who are credited/blamed for forcing a change. Note also that instead of referring to complaints from dissatisfied patients, the story categorizes the victims as "desperate" and uttering "pleas," thereby reinforcing the notion that only when victimization goes too far will there be a response.

Finally, note that this is a good example of the preconceived notion inflicting harm and creating collateral damage in the process of purveyors protecting themselves from doing wrong. Sick and handicapped people are easy to victimize and even easier to blame.

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