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Comment by maxsilver | Hacker News Reader

Except in a few very rare cases, we don't really have that in the US. In the US, the job of the pharmacist is mostly to deny patients their prescription medicine on an insurance companies behalf, or to deny a handful of the most vulnerable patients their prescription medicine because of personally-held extremist political beliefs. (/s, but like, only slightly)

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Very confidently incorrect. Doctors generally know very little about drugs and dosing - the pharmacist is the one protecting you from mixing inappropriate meds.

How can this be? Every prescription I’ve ever had was dosed by my doctor. How can you possibly prescribe a drug without knowing about drug dosing?

This has been my experience exactly.

I really like how the pharmacist who knows literally nothing about me, my diagnosis, life circumstances, family history etc... is supposed to be "the last line of defense" against all those silly doctors writing prescriptions that will kill their patients. It almost seems like the doctor might be the right person to decide what medications would work for me.

If I didn't know better I might think that pharmacists inflate their importance to try and maintain their comfortable position with a nice salary for a job that a fancy soda machine could do.

If you knew or read about retail pharmacists’ quality of life at work (and pay), you would know they are about as far from comfortable as possible. And their pay dropped precipitously over the 2010 to 2020 years when everyone else’s rise. And they get to work evenings and nights and weekends, and they get to deal with the general public, be on their feet all day, work without other professional colleagues, and work with unreliable minimum wage coworkers who are constantly changing.

See /r/pharmacy or sdnforum.

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