Pharmacist here. I can’t really agree with that take. We have shared liability, in large part because the doctor is super good at diagnosis, and relatively good at what to prescribe for it, and a pharmacist is not good at all at diagnosis, but is trained specifically on medications and interactions.
A doctor should not be prescribing something harmful for you, but it happens, and the pharmacist catches it and calls and gets it straightened out. That’s a normal situation, but opioids are a bit different.
The doctors were overprescibing, but we always were allowed to refuse prescriptions. If it was questionable, we can always call and document our conversation with the doctor. I’ve never heard of a pharmacist getting in trouble if they actually called and verified the MD did truly want that much medication, after being specifically warned of the risks.
If the pharmacists did that call for all of these, then I’m with you it’s the doctors’ fault. But if they just took in the prescriptions and filled them without checking for safe use, they failed to do their job protecting the patient from harm.
Pharmacist here. I can’t really agree with that take. We have shared liability, in large part because the doctor is super good at diagnosis, and relatively good at what to prescribe for it, and a pharmacist is not good at all at diagnosis, but is trained specifically on medications and interactions.
A doctor should not be prescribing something harmful for you, but it happens, and the pharmacist catches it and calls and gets it straightened out. That’s a normal situation, but opioids are a bit different.
The doctors were overprescibing, but we always were allowed to refuse prescriptions. If it was questionable, we can always call and document our conversation with the doctor. I’ve never heard of a pharmacist getting in trouble if they actually called and verified the MD did truly want that much medication, after being specifically warned of the risks.
If the pharmacists did that call for all of these, then I’m with you it’s the doctors’ fault. But if they just took in the prescriptions and filled them without checking for safe use, they failed to do their job protecting the patient from harm.