Healthy Skepticism Library item: 9748

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: Journal Article

Becker D, Garcia SG, Ellertson C.
Do Mexico City pharmacy workers screen women for health risks when they sell oral contraceptive pills over-the-counter?
Contraception 2004 Apr; 69:(4):295-9
http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0010782403003275

Abstract:

CONTEXT: In Mexico, oral contraceptives (OCs) are available to women over-the-counter in pharmacies. While past research has suggested that nonmedical providers, such as pharmacy workers, are capable of screening women for contraindications to OCs, little is known about their practices. METHODS: After selecting a 10% random sample of all pharmacies in Mexico City (n = 108), we surveyed the first available pharmacy worker to learn more about pharmacy workers’ screening practices when selling OCs over-the-counter to women. RESULTS: While nearly all of the pharmacy workers surveyed had sold OCs without a prescription, only 31% reported asking women any questions before selling pills. Among those who asked questions, the most commonly asked questions were about other medications a woman was taking, about blood pressure and about alcohol intake. Pharmacy workers did not ask these questions consistently to all clients. CONCLUSION: Training pharmacy workers might be one strategy to improve screening of women for pill contraindications. However, pharmacy workers may lack the time and motivation to carry out such screening. An alternative strategy might be to better inform women to self-screen for pill contraindications.

Keywords:
Adolescent Adult Contraceptives, Oral, Combined/contraindications Contraceptives, Oral, Combined/supply & distribution* Drugs, Non-Prescription/contraindications Drugs, Non-Prescription/supply & distribution* Female Humans Mass Screening/utilization* Mexico/epidemiology Middle Aged Pharmaceutical Services/standards* Pharmaceutical Services/statistics & numerical data Physician's Practice Patterns/statistics & numerical data* Women's Health

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Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909