Hey, everyone, the big secret:
Medical Doctors are not pharmacists!
Tens of thousands of Americans get very sick every year because their doctor prescribed them the wrong drugs. Doctors can hardly be blamed for this because they are to a great extent reliant on trial and error, and drug advertisements, to know if a drug works.
Pharmacists, on the other hand, are experts at drugs. This is all they do, and they continually check their references and bulletins anyway, just to make sure that there are no interactions, no contraindications, and to give you good advice on what drugs to take.
I like to think that I am very informed about pharmaceuticals in general, compared to the average intelligent person. However, I always, always, ask my pharmacist about any drugs I am taking. I give him as detailed a description of prescription, non-prescription, and all alternative medicines I take as I can.
And for his part, he never ceases to amaze me with sound advice about all of it.
And I have never even needed his services for compounding drugs for just the “cocktail” I need. That is both a science and an art form that no untrained person should ever attempt.
Should prescription drugs be available to the public without a prescription? HECK NO! Unless you want to see a lot fewer members of the public.
Soon, the US is going to be up to our eyebrows in baby boomers who are going to have a hard enough time self medicating even when it has been explained to them. Granted, if we let them have any drugs they wanted, it would solve our Social Security crisis pretty darn quick.
This raises an interesting point. If you come down with something in Spain, Switzerland, or most other countries, you can walk into any pharmacy and have the pharmacist whip up something that might help, using that expertise. I actually did this once in Greece, when I caught the sniffles. I was dispensed Claritin, which at the time was an expensive prescription-only drug in the US.