The only thing here I actually would want the pharmacist to do is ask the questions. Well, sure. I'll go ahead and grant you that. But asking the right questio

The only thing here I actually would want the pharmacist to do is ask the questions. Well, sure. I'll go ahead and grant you that. But asking the right questions is a very important, very difficult art. The answers depend on which questions are asked, and how. People sometimes forget stuff, whereas a database doesn't. True, and lots of mistakes are made because of inadequately systematized drug dispensing systems. But I'm not saying that your pharmacist shouldn't be highly augmented by powerful computer technology. Just that there's going to be a human pharmacist in that loop for the foreseeable future. There are drugs that don't require pharmacists: we call them over-the-counter drugs. Maybe someday our computers will get so good that every drug will be OTC... but I'm not an optimist. At some point designing drug cocktails becomes an art: There's no optimum to seek, because there are a number of different goals that one could pursue and tradeoffs one could make. That takes an artist -- a consulting artist, like an architect or a decorator. And that, in turn, takes serious social skills that computers don't have.