Robots, Pills And Conflicts Of Interest

from the what-happened-to-the-human-touch dept

More and more, it seems, robots are filling the prescriptions you get through your mail-order pharmacy. And, as insurance firms encourage their customers to order from their mail order firms, the likelihood that your prescription is filled by a machine, rather than a person, is high. This raises several questions: do we really trust robots to get every single pill in the bottle? And the right pill, for that matter? Is there a conflict-of-interest in that large pharmaceutical companies often own a stake in the mail-order firms? Personally, I'll take the friendly neighborhood pharmacist over a robot for this particular job.
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  • identicon
    dorpus, 5 Jan 2003 @ 11:32pm

    Why not?

    Modern drugs have so many similar spellings, and every pharmacy I go to has so many foreign (or American) workers that are not literate in English. I would be very scared of life-depending prescriptions from such places.

    This is a straightforward case of cutting out the middleman.

    This is also a case where health insurers are the good guys, because they put pressure on pharmas to lower their prices.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    John Eutsler, 11 Mar 2003 @ 3:06pm

    Pharmacy Robot

    Dan, why would you say this please explain.

    link to this | view in chronology ]


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