Read the thread from 5 years ago, get that we need people with expertise in medicine _at some point_ in the chain of care, but unclear why it all needs to be at the end.
Background: finding myself needing to visit the pharmacy quite frequently for prescriptions for family members (so no opportunity to visually inspect the patient), whenever the pharmacist goes over dosages and instructions, it’s nearly verbatim what’s printed and in the bag, and it’s always pills. Seems like you could have the pharmacists that check for bad interractions in some pharmacy Mission Control, and my small bottles of pills could be assembled from big bottles of pills by a machine.
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In the end, the Pharmacist is the last line of defense for a patient. It is their job to know what drugs do, what the pills look like and if dosage and interactions are going to be ok. People can go to multiple doctors and get many different prescriptions. If one doctor prescribed something that would have an issue with another drug they are taking, the pharmacist is the last person to stop it from having serious or fatal consequences.
Our local drug stores almost seem like they have a shortage of them and restrict the hours of service because of it. There are some jobs I wouldn’t want to trust blindly to a computer. Handing out drugs is one of them. If someone loaded a pill hopper wrong, think of the consequences to the patient.
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