Re: Pharmacists' exercise of professional discretion
by
randy-khan
06/17/2008, 3:33 PM
Every example you cite is based on concerns that relate to the pharmacist's professional role - avoiding harmful drug interactions, checking dosages to make sure they're correct, ensuring that prescriptions are valid or ensuring that they're properly authorized by the doctor. None of them are based on morality.
In fact, outside of the realm of contraception, I've never heard of a pharmacist refusing to fill a prescription on moral grounds. I'm not a fan of the Viagra comparisons that have been used repeatedly in this forum, but there are plenty of single men with ED prescriptions, and I've never heard of a pharmacist saying he won't dispense that kind of medication except to married men so as to prevent adultery or fornication. It does smack of hypocrisy to say that it's okay to make a supposedly moral decision as to one drug while not making the equivalent decision as to another.
And, in any event, pharmacists often don't know why a drug is prescribed. I'm not interested in having a pharmacist pass judgment on my reasons for taking something unless there's a question about the validity of the prescription or a drug interaction; that's the doctor's job, not the pharmacist's.