> Can someone with more familiarity explain why some drugs need to be “administered by physicians”? There is no need, this is purely regulatory capture at work

> Can someone with more familiarity explain why some drugs need to be “administered by physicians”? There is no need, this is purely regulatory capture at work. > Why can’t patients self administer Probably because it's expensive to make and the potential for abuse is very high. > why can’t a less expensive job role be imagined for a simple 5 minute visit for drugs administered in an outpatient setting? We do have a "less expensive" job role. There are nurse practitioners who could be doing the vast majority of work that we have doctors doing right now with significantly less training with basically no downsides other than to doctors, whose value would plummet. Granted, doctors in the United States are probably way overcompensated as a result of the regulations in place. In Great Britain, being a physician isn't nearly as lucrative (though it's also less time consuming/expensive to become one). > Also, for regular drugs and prescriptions, why are doctors involved at all and why does the FDA regulate access to them, creating time and cost barriers? Probably to prevent public health crises like the opium epidemic, though, you'll notice, this happened despite the best efforts of the government to prevent it. Gating access to drugs is largely to prevent abuse, though maybe there should be reform with regards to how we control access to these. Should I need to go to a doctor or could I just get a recommendation from a Pharmacist? Maybe we could designate a class of drugs acceptable for Nurse practitioners to prescribe. Maybe most drugs should just be available over the counter? The way we categorize drugs is probably too restrictive, though it isn't the primary reason drug prices are driven up. > I feel like much of the time, my physician or a physician’s assistant aren’t providing any useful diagnosis or guidance toward a prescription that I couldn’t have figured out myself. The gatekeeping almost always is frustrating because I get no value out of them. Any time a doctor comes to a different conclusion from me, despite me knowing my own body better than she does and doing plenty of my own research, obviously I'm going to be frustrated. I might even be right. But that doesn't mean that I'm generally going to be right more often than they are. I think you're probably overestimating your own abilities while discrediting the capabilities of your doctors here because doctors don't always do what you want.