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Comment by Bystander22 | Hacker News Reader

Published Oct. 2017.

Also, a rather important update tacked to the bottom:

> After this story went viral, the pharmacist interviewed provided an additional statement clarifying his remarks. “I am not aware of any member that actually has Alzheimer’s and would certainly not disclose any such information if I did know.” He added, “patient privacy is a very serious matter that I am committed to upholding.”

> He said that he was “[s]peaking very broadly about disease states that the general American population have and that it also applies to everyone including members of the U.S. House and Senate since they are also people just like you and I.”

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Honestly, it sounds like he's trying to (rather weakly) backpedal from releasing private information about some of the most powerful people in the U.S.

It's an interesting question whether this is ethical. On the one hand, representative democracy requires competent representatives, and knowing they have cognitive impairment is really important information for the whole country. On the other hand, I absolutely don't trust a random pharmacist to decide which personal, extremely sensitive information is important enough that they should be able to non-consensually share it.

Powerful people should not enjoy the same privacy guarantees that regular citizens do. They are there to represent us, and we deserve to know if they are incapable of doing that, whether because of health reasons or because they are in the pocket of lobbyists.

Agreed that a random pharmacist, with unknown motivations, should be disclosing any of this. The doctor who prescribed the meds should be (a) encouraging the representative to resign; (b) disclosing it to a proper authority; (c) disclosing to the news media if nothing is done.

It was pretty customary up untli the last few cycles of 80 year-olds being the major party nominees for presidential candidates to release all of their medical records. There is no law forcing this, but ethically, if you believe yourself to be qualified to set policy for and lead the most powerful hegemon to ever exist in the nuclear age, I think you owe it to the world to let them evaluate you on all fronts using all possible information. You no longer deserve privacy. Your tax returns, medical records, all non-classified communications, should be an open book.

There have to be tradeoffs. If you still want privacy, have it, but then you get to stay just a normally wealthy, powerful person and can live out your days sipping mai tais on tropical beaches and doing hookers and blow every night, but not being put in charge of a military with the power to glass half the planet if it wanted to.

I'm pretty sure it's a HIPAA violation for a pharmacist to disclose the medicines prescribed to a patient/customer and they were thisclose to doing so. It's a good law, and a good pharmacist wouldn't even come that close. Otherwise, were do they draw the line? What if it's not a politician, but a teacher or a community leader or a minister, or just someone in the community that the pharmacist wants to gossip about with neighbors and friends? What if it's not Alzheimer's meds but meds for an STI, or part of alcoholism/drug addiction recovery, or the early stages of Parkinsons or ALS, or hormones for a trans person, or meds to address incontinence or a miscarriage?

And if pharmacists choose to share what they know, wouldn't that drive people to get their prescriptions filled another way (fake IDs, assumed identities, black market, cross-border/mail-order) or just not get medicine for fear of a medical secret being announced?

A better alternative: We should stop electing people who are clearly having a hard time thinking.

That seems like very careful wording around the fact that pharmacists don't diagnose illnesses. My prescriptions never have a "for x disease" written on them.

Technically true, but sometimes you need a diagnosis code to fill the prescription. Also pharmacists will often talk to the physician. Since this was 2017, the medicines in question were probably donepezil and memantine. With that combination, you can be sure the issues are cognitive in nature.

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