Pharmacies Practicing Medicine!

There is something wildly inappropriate about me being traumatized when shopping for nutritional supplements in a national chain pharmacy.

I have sustained Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (luckily far from the worst cases I have seen) from my auditory trauma.

I overheard a man struggling with English (Spanish was clearly his language of origin) being told by a pharmacist that he did not have to worry if there was no record of his prescription having been phoned in by his doctor.  There was always a nurse practitioner on the premises who could just “prescribe whatever you need.”

I heard the patient struggling with the name of his medication, which sounded to me like a common blood pressure medication.

I know about medications and I prescribe them for a living, but I don’t practice outside of my specialty.  It is safer and better for my patients to get blood pressure monitoring and a physical and some blood work from the doctor who prescribes blood pressure medicine.

The prescription of a blood pressure medicine without any idea of what the parameters mentioned above are like is potentially quite dangerous.

I did have a nightmare about it, so even although this may be considered a mild case, I think I got PTSD.

The standards are down and the low-priced help is doing knee-jerk things.

People are going to die.

I am afraid, very afraid.

The institutional problems causing a scenario like this will not be solved quickly.

Patients may still value their own lives.  They must learn to value their own lives if they do not already.

They must learn enough medicine to obtain an ethical and valid level of care for themselves.

I am working as fast as I can.

Come along with me, please.