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I honestly never quite understood why prescriptions in the US need to be literally filled, when in the EU, for example, you can just walk up with your prescript
by avnigo 4y ago
I honestly never quite understood why prescriptions in the US need to be literally filled, when in the EU, for example, you can just walk up with your prescription to any pharmacy and buy a prepackaged blister pack of the medicine you need.
Not only do blister packs save so much waiting time — you never have to wait for it unless it's out of stock — but it also feels like there's less chance for anything to go wrong when manually handled by the pharmacist, factoring cross-contamination or incorrect filling, even though the pharmacists would either way be liable for it.
Blister packs are verifiably sealed by the manufacturer, you're more likely to tell if they've been tampered with, you don't have to worry about moisture seeping into the excipient and interacting with the active ingredients, and they provide a visual representation of how many pills you have already taken, without needing to count pills in a bottle.
- refurb 4y agoIt's mostly just how it's been done. You can still get a prescription "filled" by getting blister packs in the US. But if you think of drugs that are dispenses in the tens of thousands each month, like cholesterol medication - the amount of packaging the pharmacy would have to store would be massive.
- sithadmin 4y agoIt's more than tradition and efficiency; the US doesn't have the supply chain trust issues that many other countries do when it comes to prescription drugs. There are plenty of parts of the world where a bottle of loose pills is going to be treated as suspect no matter who dispenses it to the patient. Giving consumers individual packages with counterfeit-deterrent measures and serialization that can be verified with the manufacturer as part of a valid production lot increases consumer confidence and makes counterfeiting more difficult.