Some professional pharmacy facts derived from the national drug store survey**Department of Commerce, Washington.
✍ Scribed by Delgado, Frank A.
- Publisher
- Elsevier
- Year
- 1932
- Weight
- 623 KB
- Volume
- 21
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0898-140X
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
With this survey of Pharmacy and its far-reaching recommendations, endorsed by the Committee on the Costs of Medical Care, before us, I may perhaps be pardoned for venturing a prophecy as to what developments we may look forward to in the next twenty-five years.
The public will continue to support the modem drug store and will expect it to su ply many non-medical services along with complete pharmaceutical service. There will be an increasing realization, however, that the "jack of all trades," although frequently a convenience, is to be avoided when the services of a master pharmacist are required. Prescription specialists will be sought out just as medical specialists are now given preference to the general practitioner. The comer drug stores will be the base of operations of the general practitioner in pharmacy. He will become more and more a dispenser of ready-made drugs and medicines. He will refer demands for unusual prescriptions and other pharmaceutical service to the specialist, just as the general practitioner of medicine refers unusual cases to the specialist. The pharmaceutical Code of Ethics will have to be developed to cover the new conditions as they arise.
He will be located near medical centers and will frequently be affiliated with them. His base of operations may be a laboratory in a physician's office building, a hospital laboratory or a prescription pharmacy in a busy section of a city.
As health insurance schemes and industrial or State medicine develop, opportunities for the practice of professional pharmacy in these respective fields will become available and will be seized by well-trained pharmacists who now hunger for a chance to practice their profession. Advice on preventive measures, diet and health regulation will be sought and obtainable from the pharmacist. Education of the pharmacist will gradually swing from the narrow field of drug therapy to the broader field of health conservation in all its phases. The present courses in pharmacy will be found inadequate for training the pharmacist who desires to meet the needs which modern medical practice will demand of him. Radical changes in curricula will be demanded and graduate instruction will become an inevitable prerequisite for the practice of pharmacy in its strictly professional aspects. The business of conducting a Pharmacy and the professional Practice of Pharmacy will be gradually divorced. Both will be honorable pursuits engaged in by men of decidedly different inclinations and training but with health service to the public as their common aim.