Healthy Skepticism Library item: 3877

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: news

Fursiewicz R.
Future of pharmacy: robots and herbs
The Gateway ( University of Alberta Canada ) 2006 Mar 18
http://www.gateway.ualberta.ca/view.php?aid=5928

Notes:

Ralph Faggotter’s Comments:

What will it mean to have robot dispensing machines in pharmacies?

How widespread will this practice become?

Will it lead to pharmaceutical dispensing machines, like soft drink machines, in sports venues and stores?

Full text:

Future of pharmacy: robots and herbs

Rob Fursiewicz

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Future University of Alberta Pharmacy graduates: no worries yet-your services likely won’t be outsourced to India or Kyrgyzstan, at least for the time being. But your job might one day be taken by a robot.

A Connecticut hospital has recently spent over $1 million on an automated drug-dispensing robot. It goes by the name, “Safely Administering Medication,” or the less-geeky, SAM, for short-or the even geekier, “McKesson Robot RX,” its technical name.

As the Associated Press reports, the robo-pharmacist “occupies most of a corner of a room in the pharmacy department [with] an agile, mechanical arm protruding from a pole in the center of an octagon [on which] are hundreds of individually wrapped pieces of medicine, hanging from metal pins.” SAM takes orders from higher-ups, finds the drug and drops it into an envelope, which is then verified by a real, live pharmacist.

Blame it on the American health care system, where something called “profit” allows for the purchase of such an extravagant device. Three thousand such “medication-dispensing machines” are being used in the US. Of course, there’s a benefit for pharmacists: more time spent with patients rather than the mundane, robotic tasks that could be done quicker by, well, robots.

But forget SAM for now. There’s an even bigger evil, ready and willing to render irrelevant the drugs that you’ll have spent four years learning about. No, it’s not a pharmacy-sabotaging killer robot. It’s alternative medicine-also known as “Complementary and Alternative Medicine,” or CAM (eerily and suspiciously similar to SAM)-and it’s turning law-abiding pharmaceutical patients into pot-smoking aromatherapy addicts.

In fact, the problem (or solution, depending on your perspective) has gotten so big that the US’s National Institute of Health has been given its own department: the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. If a “National Institute of Health” is a scientific endeavour, the NCCAM’s own website might give you second thought: the section entitled, “Treating Type-2 Diabetes with Dietary Supplements,” starts by warning of “limited scientific evidence on the effectiveness of dietary supplements … The evidence that is available is not sufficiently strong to prove that any of the six supplements discussed in this report have benefits for type-2 diabetes or its complications.”

Who needs a doctor, pharmacist or drugs for type-2 diabetes when we have that kind of assurance? After reading such a warning, you’d have to ask: what’s the point?

As the National Post reported this month, Health Canada is taking steps to remove a ban on “natural health remedies.” The Centre for Science in the Public Interest calls this move “strikingly irresponsible.” But one of Health Canada’s conditions might pose a problem to alternative medicine marketers: proof of efficacy is required. Surely this will only slow these people down!

Alt-meds have now snuck into higher education. The U of A’s Faculty of Pharmacy offers a course called “Complementary/Alternative Medicinal Therapies,” which considers “herbal preparations, nutritional supplements, and homeopathics.” The course emphasizes the “role of the pharmacist to help clients make an informed choice and counsel them on the selection of useful and safe products.” It appears to be taught from a patient’s perspective, where the pharmacist is dealing with a patient’s God-given right to dabble in alt-meds, rather than the pharmacist learning about alt-meds for any inherent medicinal value.

Meanwhile, Athabasca University offers a Bachelor of (Human) Science degree, part of which may include an optional course titled, “Alternative Therapies.” Its major topics are “mind-body interventions, chiropractic, massage therapy, reflexology, acupuncture, therapeutic touch, iridology, homeopathy, herbalism, diet therapy, naturopathy, cancer therapy, Native healing, aromatherapy, music therapy and chelation.” Sounds like a jolly good time, but only tangentially related to humans and/or science.

At the very least, today’s pharmacists have an obligation to become aware of drug-drug interactions between actual drugs and the ever-popular alternative therapies that might interfere with them (or vice versa). In the August 2005 issue of Consumer Reports, about half of respondents in a poll of 34 000 Americans reported using an alternative treatment in the past two years. A 2004 report from the Medical Journal of Australia suggests that the rise of alternative medicines is a result of general societal changes that include “the consumer and green movements, as well as postmodernism”-damn liberal pharmahippies-rather than a specific grievance with modern medicine.

Perhaps we’re entering a new age of “postmodern” health- and pharmacare, where rosiglitazone is replaced by reflexology and iridology takes the place of isotretinoin.

In the future, while robots take care of the menial tasks (and start encroaching even further on human turf), perhaps pharmacists angered by the incessant clunking and buzzing of their electronically powered colleagues can hand their patients a copy of “How to Be Your Own Herbal Pharmacist” before taking a job at a traditional pharmaceutical-based pharmacy (now with 100 per cent human employees!). Don’t fret, since such a scenario might be only, say, ten years away.

As that Austrialian report suggests, “CAM is here to stay and will continue to present challenges for conventional medicine on how to respond.”

Perhaps one day, the robots will handle that problem for us.