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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   18937 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 9, 2025

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I'm one of those "won't go to the doctor unless a limb falls off" guys, so I was in my 30s before I realized that doctor prescriptions are sent to a specific pharmacy, and you cannot buy the prescribed medicine from any other pharmacy. If you want to buy your prescribed medication from a different pharmacy, you have to talk to the doctor (or, more likely, the nurse that is being supervised by a doctor) and ask them to send the prescription to a new pharmacy. What the actual fuck?!

It's shit like this that convinces me to stick with OTC pills until the day I die.

In Mexico I filled prescriptions by taking the slip of paper to a farmacia of my choosing. Just walk in and get it. Such a better system.

In ye old days we gave you a physical prescription that you could take with you, show up the pharmacy and shout "gib dis" and if they said "no have" you could take the same piece of paper to another place.

Now we mostly use electronic medical records and we ask you what your pharmacy is and send the information directly to that pharmacy.

Why do we do it that way? Likely things like "regulatory burden" and "let's not accidentally D-DOS the pharmacies with all of these requests."

Now I personally prefer paper script pads for some types of things and ask for them myself, but if your doctor does not allow that it likely it is because whoever owns them (large hospital system or PE firm) does not permit them. We don't complain too much because handwriting a prescription is a pain the ass and our handwriting is more ass.

I don't care if the prescription is printed rather than handwritten. Or if it's in a national database instead of being a physical document. I just don't want it to be sent to a single pharmacy; that's fucking ridiculous.

Even better, no medications should require a prescription. Let it all be OTC. Then the prescription can simply be information about what your doctor recommends.

Again, the ability to walk around with a general prescription that can be used at any pharmacy is the default state - in essence it has been removed by regulatory burden and corporate oversight.

No reason it can't come back other than those things (and plenty of doctors are still able to prescribe via paper).

Take it up with the government.

Expanded OTC formularies are something that can be done in different cultural milieus but is simply incompatible with America. Too many people would kill or harm themselves or others. The costs and externalities are too high.

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