6 ms·

You're really blaming the wrong people. Blame the doctor for screwing it up, your wife for not checking the prescription, or the government for creating/enforci

• ajeet_dhaliwal 8y ago
  So in effect he's right to suggest the pharmacist should just be replaced by a robot because you would have them follow the rules no matter what with all humanity stripped out. If there was more than one pharmacist available it wouldn't have killed him/her to go and take a look at the wife in the car.
  • mschuster91 8y ago
    > If there was more than one pharmacist available it wouldn't have killed him/her to go and take a look at the wife in the car. Depending on the jurisdiction, pharmacists aren't allowed to prescribe stuff or treat people on the spot. That's business of a (licensed) doctor.
  • lmm 8y ago
    The pharmacist can, and should, use their human judgement to refuse to dispense drugs even when prescribed. But they don't and shouldn't use their human judgement to dispense drugs that weren't prescribed; this is by design and for good reason. It's a two-person rule: you only get the drugs if both the pharmacist and the doctor formally agreed you should get them.
    • rixed 8y ago
      The problem seems to be that the drug has indeed been prescribed, but the writing was erroneous. This is not about "should we freely sell drug", but about "should we use human judgment in addition to paper orders". Clearly, some commenters are also trying hard to be robot-swappable. :)
      • lmm 8y ago
        The prescription was for the wrong drug, i.e. the wrong drug was prescribed and conversely the right drug was not prescribed. The pharmacist can, should, and quite possibly did use their human judgement to refuse to dispense the wrong drug, even though it was prescribed. But by design they don't have the authority to dispense the right drug without getting a doctor to formally prescribe it.
      • barkingcat 8y ago
        I really wouldn't be surprised if it turned out a large percentage (over 35%) of hacker news commenters originate from robots / ai / chatbots being trained / tested surreptitiously.
  • acomjean 8y ago
    You are right and make an interesting point. Part of the advantage of dealing with a human is that one hopes they can deal with whatever strange problem it thrown at them. If you can’t deal with corner cases, or have none than leveraging rules/software is the way to go. I think of vending machines and parking meters as automation of simple tasks, but what to do when they break? I think google tries this by trying to “automate all the things”. It works most times but when it goes wrong it makes it very frustrating to correct.
    • teekert 8y ago
      When they (the machines) break, a human should be able to override, i.e., I was once stuck in a malfunctioning parking garage (no ability to pay, barrier stayed shut), so I lifted the barrier and let everyone out without paying. This could be illegal, but keeping me in a parking garage without telling me how long it will take is also a crime. Please don't make human un-openable parking garages, ever (meaning: don't let a robot decide whether a human is allowed to leave).
      • jexah 8y ago
        This is a completely different scenario to the one described above. You yourself are potentially breaking the law (if the boom gate is damaged, assisting in potential theft of services rendered, etc) to prevent your car being stuck in the parking lot (which very likely has a clause in the conditions of entry, so may not be illegal). The two key points are that you are committing the crime yourself, not asking somebody else to, and that it is in fact only potentially a crime, and even then it's relatively minor, and could be argued strongly in court. You are not asking somebody else to illegally sell you opioids (for example) with no prescription. From what it sounds like, nobody was in real danger, just pain, and you expect people to risk everything they've spent their entire life working for just to prevent an hour of pain for some stranger?
        • teekert 8y ago
          We don't have a suing culture so much here so I don't think that is relevant. Also, I feel that medical personnel should minimize suffering to the best of their ability, they don't take an oath swearing to fully emulate an emotionless robot.
  • jexah 8y ago
    It doesn't matter if the pharmacist thinks -- or even knows -- that they are doing the "right thing", pharmacists cannot prescribe medications. Their life would be over in a heartbeat if anybody ever found out that he or she legally provided a drug to somebody without a prescription. Additionally, pharmacists should use their best judgement to deny valid prescriptions, similar to how a bartender would use their best judgement to not sell alcohol to a customer.
• PurpleBoxDragon 8y ago
  In which case you blame the programmer who wrote the code, not the employee following the software. Your idea of deferring to the rules over all common sense is the core of the problem. It doesn't matter if we are talking about government rules over which they'll enslave you if you break them or corporate rules over which they'll fire and blacklist you if you break them.
• pqs 8y ago
  My mother had a pharmacy and she often called the doctor to solve this issues. The doctor is a phone call away, and the pharmacist job is to do whatever he cans to improved the patient's illness.