What’s with the new cough and cold products?

One of my earliest lessons as a pharmacist working in the “real world” was that customers didn’t always act the way I expected. Parents of sick children frequently fell into this category — and the typical vignette went like this for me:

1. Parent has determined that their child is sick, and needs some sort of over-the-counter medicine.
2. Parent asks pharmacist for advice selecting a product from the dozens on the shelves.
3. Pharmacist uses the opportunity to provide science-based advice, and assures parent that no drug therapy is necessary.
4. Parent directly questions the validity of this advice, and may ask about the merits of a specific product they have already identified.
5. Pharmacist explains efficacy and risk of the product, and provides general non-drug symptom management suggestions.
6. Parent thanks pharmacist, selects product despite advice, and walks to the front of the store to pay.

In many ways, a pharmacy purchase mirrors the patient-physician interaction that ends with a prescription being written — it’s what feels like the logical end to the consultation, and without it, feels incomplete. It’s something that I’m observing more and more frequently when advising parents about cough and cold products for children.

Homeopathy: The Comic Treatment

From the same cartoonist that brought you The Facts in the Case of Andrew Wakefield, Darryl Cunningham now brings you The Story of Homeopathy. If you don’t want to read all the prior SBP posts on homeopathy, Darryl’s comic pretty much sums it up.

Pharmacists, Pharmacies, Homeopathy, and Ethics

Is it ethical for a pharmacist to knowingly sell a mislabeled product – one that contains no active ingredient, and has been demonstrated to be no more effective than a placebo? That’s the question being asked by Dr. Chris MacDonald over at the Business Ethics blog today:

If someone selling something believes that it doesn’t work, should they tell you so? Does it matter if the person doing the selling is a licensed professional, someone with advanced training and a sworn duty to promote the public good?

Dr. MacDonald is referring to the fallout from the UK Parliament’s Science and Technology Committee Evidence Check on Homeopathy, which I’ve blogged about previously. As I pointed out in yesterday’s post, the regulatory body for pharmacists in Northern Ireland is acting on this report, and has proposed that patients be told that homeopathic products do not work, other than having a placebo effect.