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Comment by andyjohnson0 | Hacker News Reader

What about drugs that can have harmful interactions with a person's other health conditions or other drugs that they are taking? A big part of the role doctors and pharmacists in the prescribing process is to guard against this. Are ordinary, non-medically qualified people really supposed to navigate this on their own?

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If you have humans in the loop, they're going to make mistakes. Pharmacists and doctors also have bad days and forget things. People are their own best advocates and caretakers.

If there's a database with contraindicators, make it public, let people search it, require packaging to inform the public to search the database for contraindicators for their own safety before taking the drug. If people are really unsure, they can decide to engage a doctor or pharmacist instead of being forced to engage a doctor or pharmacist.

Doctors are navigating interactions in large parts by database lookups anyway - there are websites where you enter drugs and get a list of possible interactions. Those could be made available to patients too (the one I saw a doctor in my family using is provided by some medical website and softly gated "for doctors use only").

Natural selection will eventually handle the crowd of people who take random drugs without considering possible interactions.

Hardware stores also sell many things that will kill you if used incorrectly. We can't have the world revolve around the least capable of us, it's holding everyone back.

Ordinary people can and do in many places. Pharmacies can still employ pharmacists who will advise you or ask questions if you’re something risky that may interact with others. You can always check with a doctor before hand. Most medicines don’t have significant interactions and those that do you will usually be warned to check about by both doctors and pharmacists.

A lot of “safety” concerns is just FUD spread by a system that wants to preserve itself.

If doctors and pharmacists were effective in preventing all adverse interactions, we wouldn’t have those “don’t take ADVERTIX if…” disclaimers in US drug ads.

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