U.S. to make More Drugs Easily Available, Cutting Role Doctors Play
I live in a country where this scheme is already the norm (Saudi Arabia) and I can say that while it&#x27;s not necessarily ideal, I much prefer it to the alternative. It plugs some seriously annoying holes in the healthcare experience and frees up doctors&#x27; time for more patients.<p>As it is, the only medications that require a prescription to buy in Saudi are psychotropic ones, narcotics, and most recently, antibiotics. Things like insulin, birth control medications, hypertension medications, even antidepressants and anti-psychotics- they are all OTC. And I think they should remain so, because from what I&#x27;ve seen the damage from misusing those drugs against pharmacists&#x27; advice is far less than the damage from going without them due to the difficulties encountered in seeing a doctor.<p>The reason that this is the norm here is twofold; one, health insurance wasn&#x27;t much of a thing here until a few years ago. The second reason (and the reason health insurance didn&#x27;t factor in until recently) is that the socialized healthcare system here was (and still is) stretched thin; seeing a doctor to get prescriptions for every little thing becomes prohibitively difficult, with appointments taking months.<p>It&#x27;s asinine to expect someone suffering from, say, an acute athsma attack to try to navigate ERs or try to see a doctor on short notice during a crisis, when a pharmacist would be able to dispense the exact medication needed, leaving the others free for more complex cases that need closer attention.<p>Edit: this actually created a bit of culture shock for an older friend of mine. He was traveling to an EU country for the first time and didn&#x27;t do his homework- he thought he he could simply walk into any pharmacy and ask for a pack of his cholesterol medication, as he usually does back home. I don&#x27;t envy the poor pharmacist that had to keep trying to explain the dispensing system to him and to emphasize that yes, they are aware that it&#x27;s Lipitor, not morphine, it&#x27;s just how the regulation is.