Letters
Dispensing with prescriptions
EDITOR, - R E Ferner paints an unnecessarily black picture in discussing the switching of drugs from being available on prescription only to being available from a pharmacy only, and the two main caveats require comment.1 Far from there being no system for patients and pharmacists to report adverse reactions to over the counter drugs, they need only inform the general practitioner, who can use the yellow card system approved for this task. Doctors already ask about non-prescribed medicines and will become more aware of this need with time.
Ferner's other negative argument is that patients may be encouraged to seek treatment for trivial ailments. Patients already consume many over the counter drugs for minor symptoms: the general household survey found that twice as many patients had taken an over the counter preparation in the previous two weeks (27%) as had taken a prescription medicine (13%).2 The need is to
CiteULike 
Complore 
Connotea 
Del.icio.us 
Digg 
Reddit 
Technorati What's this?
Relevant Article
- Dispensing with prescriptions
- R E Ferner
BMJ 1994 308: 1316.[Extract] [Full Text]
This Article
- Full text
- Respond to this article
- Alert me when this article is cited
- Alert me when responses are posted
- Alert me when a correction is posted
Services
- Email this article to a friend
- Find similar articles in BMJ
- Add article to my folders
- Download to citation manager
- Request Permissions
Citing Articles
Google Scholar
PubMed
Related Content
- General practice / family medicine
- Relevant Article
- Find this article in its weekly table of contents
Bookmark with
What's new
Latest blogs
Find BMJ on:
Services
Tools
Online poll
Resources
Rapid responses for this article
There are no rapid responses for this article. Print issues
