Abstract
A debate has arisen within the medical community over whether physicians should dispense drugs from their offices. Some have argued merely that it is inadvisable for physicians to dispense drugs; others have taken a stronger line and argued that physicians ought to be regulated out of the drug-dispensing business. In what follows, I will consider some of the arguments that might be given for outlawing the dispensing of drugs by physicians and explain why I do not find these arguments persuasive.
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Notes and References
George Eliot, Middlemarch ( Penguin Books, Baltimore, 1974 ), p. 176.
John Schwartz, Now, One-Stop Medicine?,Newsweek, May 25, 1987, p. 32.
See Tim Beardsley, One-Stop Medicine, Scientgic American, November 1987, p. 34, and John W. Merline, Doctor Drugs, Consumers’ ResearchMagazine, July 1987, p. 38, for two estimates of how many physicians dispense drugs.
Schwartz, Now, One-Stop Medicine?, p. 32..
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Congressional Quarterly Almanac, vol. XLIII (1987), p. 534.
Versions of this argument can be found in Myths and Facts about Physician Dispensing, US Pharmacist, August 1988, p. 17.
Business Bulletin, The Wall Street Journal, June 18, 1987, p. 1.
According to a study done for the American Pharmaceutical Association (and reported in Physician Dispensing: New Facts Revealed, US Pharmacist, June 1988, p. 13), physician dispensing costs consumers more per prescription than if comparable scripts were dispensed from a pharmacy. Similar findings are reported in Myths and Facts about Physician Dispensing, p. 17.
Schwartz, Now, One-Stop Medicine?, p. 32.
Physician Dispensing: New Facts Revealed, p. 13.
This shows, by the way, that the opponents of physician-dispensed drugs are making an error when, in order to show that pharmacist-dispensed drugs are cheaper than physician-dispensed drugs, they compare the price of pharmacist-dispensed drugs in the current economic environment with the price of physician-dispensed drugs. The real question is whether the price of pharmacist-dispensed drugs in the absence of competition from physicians would be lower than the prices at which physicians now dispense drugs.
This line of argument has been offered, for example, by Robert J. Bolger, president of the National Association of Chain Drug Stores (Merline, Doctor Drugs, p. 38), by the National Association of Retail Druggists (Schwartz, Now, One-Stop Medicine?, p. 32), and by Arnold S. Reiman, editor of The New England Journal of Medicine (Doctors and the Dispensing of Drugs, The New England Journal of Medicine, July 30, 1987, pp. 311, 312 ).
Arnold S. Reiman, for example, suggests that consumers might not be the best judges of the value and quality of what they buy: At one point, he questions the assumption that patients are consumers, who can shop for the medical goods and services they want and are able to judge for themselves whether the offered item is worth the money (Doctors and the Dispensing of Drugs, p. 311).
Schwartz, Relman, Now, One Stop Medicine?, p. 33.
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Irvine, W.B. (1990). The Case for Physician-Dispensed Drugs. In: Humber, J.M., Almeder, R.F. (eds) Biomedical Ethics Reviews · 1989. Biomedical Ethics Reviews. Humana Press, Totowa, NJ. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-59259-444-3_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-59259-444-3_3
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