This I Believe: A New Way to Protect Life

In the world of medicine we find many challenges. According to the This I Believe website, one must can openly express their views, I would like to discuss the problems facing modern medicine. The most frustrating challenge I believe is the simplest; the inability to be effective in healing people from whatever medical conditino they have. In other words, modern medicine cannot help everyone get well, the human body and its systems require far more advancements in technology in order to make significant progress. It is for this reason that I believe pharmacy represents a great opportunity for science to apply itself to medicine. I can remember when my grandmother was in the hospital and I was pleading with the doctors to tell of all the ways in which we could help her, but they said that our options were limited and the best thing we could do was to help the body help itself. Luckily my grandmother turned out be healthy, but countless people require more proactive medicine in order to get well.

Pharmacy can be the vehicle to deliver the best of what medical science has to offer in a proactive manner. Unfortunately, I believe that we face a fundamental dilemma in medical science; the human body is the product of billions of years of evolution, and despite the immense understanding of human physiology the scientific community has amassed in the last thousand years, I feel that the human body is far more complicated than we would like to admit. In my own personal studies of medicine and human physiology, I find that the more I understand about the human body, the more lost and disconnected I feel as I only come to realized how vast and complicated our bodies truly are.
In order to put this into perspective, one could imagine if the world’s top electrical engineers, computer programmers and physicists were asked to build a robot that could perform half of the functions a human adult can, reading, writing, driving a car, playing basketball, while at the same time requiring only simple food and water, both commonly found of course, and emitting no pollution which is uncommon for man made machines, capable of automatically maintaining itself, and so on. The task would be impossible; even if someone gave me 100 billion dollars and asked me to build a robot that could effectively do any of those things I’d give the money back and say it cannot be done. Now with this in mind, imagine trying to improve upon the human body itself, the task seems immense, but I am confident that progress can be made, and it is through pharmacy that we can best apply our scientific knowledge. The commercial value of the pharmaceutical industry is undoubtedly growing. I mention ethics because the growing industry represents another important opportunity in medicine. Although the practice of pharmacy is as old as medicine, the new applications of pharmacy provide an opportunity for medicine to lay new ethical and moral standards by which all should health industries can abide. As pharmaceuticals become increasingly more powerful and effective, especially in the field of nueropsychotics, we must review our ethical standards and possible adjust them to accommodate the new applications of many drugs.

Pharmcy Robberies: An Unexpected Side-effect of OxyCotin

A recent but unfortunate trend of pharmacy robberies has been taking hold nationwide. The assailants are holding up pharmacies in order to access popular drugs such as OxyCotin, which are only available through a prescription. Pharmacies make easy targets for several reasons; firstly, they usually do not undertake the regular security precautions that other high risk vendors employ; such as the bullet-proof glass found in many gas stations and banks. Secondly, the nature of a pharmacy entails a relaxed and unsuspecting environment, with easy access to the public; this fact gives robbers the element of surprise. Another element adds to the problem of pharmacy hold ups, the suspects are not usually from the municipality where the pharmacy is located; they commonly travel from poorer neighborhoods. It seems as though the criminals are avoiding local pharmacies because they would have more active and passive protective measures against robberies. The most common active protective measure is a weapon, such as a firearm or chemical spray.

However, the problem lies not only in prevention of the robberies, but in avoidance of those factors that lead individuals to commit such crimes. Morphine and OxyCotin are some of the most widely abused prescription drugs, so much in fact that the FDA released a 63 page report on the abuse of OxyCotin. In my opinion, the prevention of drug addiction is a better method of addressing the issue. However, it must be stated that much is already being to in order to help prevent the abuse of OxyCotin and drugs of the sort. One of the best possible methods to prevent such abuse is to monitor the use of these drugs to patients who have legitimate prescriptions. More often than not, users become dependent while they are using it with a valid prescription. However, when the prescription runs out, users find they are addicted, and search for new means to access the same drug. Some individuals claim that they have lost their supply, and request more, others buy it illegally on the black market, and some take the extreme measure of robbing suppliers, such as pharmacies or even hospitals. On the other hand, it can be argued that an individual willing to commit armed robbery is immune to any prevention methods available, and that the nature of that individual renders him helpless. Honestly, I cannot think of a strong counterargument other than to say that modern science is incapable of correctly diagnosing an individual as “beyond help” and thus we must as a fair society treat all members in danger of drug addiction or violence as being within the bounds of aid. Unfortunately however, I believe that modern pharmacies and government agencies are ignoring abuse-prevention, and instead are focusing their energies on robbery prevention.