Somehow I think that anyone that is radical enough to get worked up about birth control pills are probably going to be bothered by the notion that their refusal to dispense biorth control pills is leading to more abortions.
Der Trihs, considering the fact that my church is led by a woman, I can’t even take your accusation seriously. And I don’t mean that my local congregation is led by a woman (although it has been); the literal presiding leaders of my church (both of the clergy and the laity) are women. And not your strawman “self-hating women” either, but strong, liberal, feminist women (who I usually disagree with, but there you are). You, on the other hand, cling to a exaggerated characture of religion that is far more irrational and hateful than anything you rant about. And that’s the last thing I’ll say on the topic. Hopefully you’ll add more because every post makes you look more silly.
What Cat Fight said isn’t factually correct, it has a basis in fact, but the details are wrong. Plan-B doesn’t have 10 times the active as BCPs, its active ingredient is Levonorgestrel, which is a synthetic progesterone. There are many different types of BCPs on the market, and they all have different hormones in them, with most using some other combination of progesterone and estrogen analogs. While it is true you can take some BCPs as an emergency contraceptive, there are many you can’t take that way, and the ones that do work that way use different quantity of pills depending on the particular medication. The 10 tablets Cat Fight said would be too much, too little, or not work at all, depending on the brand of BCP taken.
When you drop a script off at the counter, it then needs to be typed into the computer, the insurance claim needs to be processed, the bottle found on shelf, then amount counted out, put in vial with label. Then the Pharmacist needs to check it, and run a check to make sure there are no drug-drug-interactions. If everything goes perfectly smoothly, this would take about 5 to 7 minutes of undivided attention, per an individual script. The problem comes up with the insurance not paying, or requiring more info, or something is wrong with the script, or we need to call the doctor, or the phone rings, or some comes to the counter to ask where the toilet paper is, or any of the other million things that could happen. Now, even if we didn’t have a problem with your script, there could have been a problem with the script in front of you that causes us to be backed up.
Also, even if there is no wait at all, and we are all caught up, if you drop a script off, the minimum time I’ll tell you in 15 minutes, even if I know it will be ready in 5, just because I don’t know what will happen, and it is better to be below the estimate then above the estimate.
There are actually many therapeutic uses for certain BCPs that are an approved usage, and the woman’s age doesn’t have anything to do with it. Older women are prescribed BCPs for non-contraceptive purposes as much as younger women. However, the percentage is greater in younger women, especially teenagers, just for the sole reason that they might not be sexually active yet and need a contraceptive. But in absolute numbers, it is probably about the same.
Really? I think the lack of respect for the customer is more important in this situation. I do respect pharmacists. Their job is to provide me what I need, their feelings have nothing to do with it.
It’s quite common, but that’s beside the point - access to birth control is a constitutionally protected right, just as religious freedom is. If it’s so uncommon, we presumably wouldn’t be seeing much harm to pharmacists, either.
In those states, it is an access issue. If your pharmacy won’t fill the original prescription, and you can’t go to another for whatever reason, you can’t get your prescription mailed either.
Hormonal BCPs have many Drug-Drug-interactions, it is not safe enough for a layperson to self-administer them. (Which is what the FDA requires for a OTC product).
Oh, and Der Trihs, your comments show a total lack of respect for the profession of pharmacy, not just the pharmacists who abuse their power. Pharmacists are a check on a doctor’s prescribing power, doctors only have the equivalent of one semester of pharmacology during medical school, while pharmacists have 4 years. Drugs can interact with each other in surprising ways, and if we were replaced with “vending machines”, I know there will be a rash of deaths caused by medication errors in the United States. Most times when a pharmacist catch an error, the patient doesn’t even know about it, since we get it fixed before they even come pick up their script.
Yes. This shouldn’t be surprising, since I want to change their behavior.
I **FULLY **agree. There are better places to discuss your (numerous?:p) personal failings than in here.
Well, until the inevitable day when the majority wises up and makes it illegal to disciminitavely refuse to stock and fill legitimate prescriptions for purely religious reasons, anyway.
We don’t*. We’re saying that they shouldn’t revert to the behavior of an untrained mook. Any monkey can not fill a prescription for a medically-irrelevent personal reason.
- Possibly excepting Der Trihs; I’ve stopped reading his full posts in this thread and so can’t comment on their content. Honestly I kinda wish he would get off my side here…
His first amendment rights are not being restricted. I believe Bricker has stated so explicitly, and he wouldn’t be inclined to look the other way.
They are sold without a prescription in other countries, and I have seen many arguments that the FDA’s decisions regarding what is OTC and what isn’t is less based on safety than on advocacy from interested parties.
As with all drug decisions, I want it based on science, not someone’s gut feelings and not someone’s religious beliefs.
Here is a list of drugs that have Major or Moderate interactions with Ortho Tri Cyclen Lo (first one that came to mind):
[ul]
Major
* Felbamate
* Isotretinoin
* Paclitaxel
* Paclitaxel Protein-Bound
* Theophylline
* Tizanidine
Moderate
* Alprazolam
* Amoxicillin
* Ampicillin
* Amprenavir
* Aprepitant
* Bacampicillin
* Betamethasone
* Bexarotene
* Bosentan
* Carbamazepine
* Colesevelam
* Cyclosporine
* Darunavir
* Delavirdine
* Doxycycline
* Efavirenz
* Etravirine
* Fosamprenavir
* Fosaprepitant
* Fosphenytoin
* Ginseng
* Griseofulvin
* Lamotrigine
* Licorice
* Minocycline
* Modafinil
* Mycophenolate Mofetil
* Mycophenolic Acid
* Nelfinavir
* Nevirapine
* Oxcarbazepine
* Oxytetracycline
* Phenobarbital
* Phenytoin
* Pioglitazone
* Prednisolone
* Primidone
* Rifabutin
* Rifampin
* Rifapentine
* Ritonavir
* Rosuvastatin
* Rufinamide
* Selegiline
* St John's Wort
* Tetracycline
* Tipranavir
* Topiramate
* Troglitazone
* Troleandomycin
* Valdecoxib
* Voriconazole
* Warfarin
[/ul]
Source: Micromedex
As you can see, there are many drugs listed here. IMHO, there is plenty of scientific evidence that BCPs should stay prescription only.
Okay, this is off-topic, but I’m curious: if a woman is on Ortho Try Cyclen Lo, what is the potential “moderate” interaction with
?
I’ll continue the hijack…
Good to know as Easter approaches!
(Obviously jelly bean makers hate women too!)
Actually they want to make them all fat so that they can be enslaved more easily. But that’s a separate discussion.
Personally I don’t think a pharmacist’s religious beliefs should ever, ever get in the way of dispensing medicine. If a person has religious beliefs that conflict with performing that job, then maybe they should have picked a different career in the first place. It’d be like a Jewish person getting a job as a bacon-taster* and then complaining when expected to do their job’s duties.
- Does this job exist and if so, where can I apply?
This. There is not a single, solitary pharmacist who has been licensed in the last nearly 40 years who didn’t know going in that working in retail pharmacy meant dispensing birth control pills. Going through with pharmacy school and licensing anyway, getting a job in retail pharmacy anyway, and then spouting off about how it’s against your morals is…well, dumb. It would be like me spending years getting certified as a vet tech and then announcing I couldn’t clean cages because I had a religious objection to mopping up piss and shit.
And, frankly, it would be different if the people who refuse to dispense the pill were doing so because of evidence-based medicine. If there were any reputable medical literature that backed up their claim the pill was an abortifacient, if they were making this decision based on any sort of actual medical issue, I could see their point. Medical ethics allow for people making judgment calls in the face of credible medical evidence. But there’s not any evidence that the bcp or the morning after pill are abortifacients. None. The refusal to sell, therefore, is both bad medicine (drawing conclusions not backed up by the available evidence) and bad ethics (letting your personal preferences work to the patient’s detriment in direct opposition to the available evidence.)
As such, I say fuck 'em. Fuck 'em in the ear with a rusty spike.
Right. Okay. I’m out. But if any pharmacists want to refuse service, I suggest they start with some of the women in this thread – ‘Hi, welcome to town. Now that you’re done losing hair, gaining weight, bleeding excessively and cutting yourself and have finally found the birth control that works for you – and that you can afford – I just thought I’d let you know that you’re not going to get it from me. And I’m the only game in town. Try the internet. Hope you don’t mind the weight, I know getting out of sync for just a day might throw you off for months, making it less effective in preventing pregnancy and causing weeks’ worth of breakthrough bleeding and side effects.’
Maybe they could have a sign in the window, a crossed-out uterus or women symbol or something? At least then there’d be some warning, and decent people could avoid their store.
Can you point to any group that didn’t oppress women in the last 5 millenia? (of course having been there for more than 1000 years).
One-trick pony all the way.
What’s the science on selling whatever damn you want for whatever reason you want so long as you follow the law?
As to the spike, I don’t think it would be possible: you never let go of it
What’s the science on reading for comprehension? The complaint was that their reason for refusing to sell was based on scientific ignorance, on top of an aversion to chemical abortion. The statement was that if they weren’t compounding religious foolishness with scientific foolishness, their choice to withhold sales wouldn’t be so annoying. Obviously, comments on how they have a right to sell stuff have no bearing whatsoever on the complaint of how stupid they’re being in doing so.
That said, I think she was giving these people too much credit. I think most of them oppose contraception because they want to control other people’s behavior - I think that not wanting to aid and abett abortion has little to do with it. They don’t want to support/permit the perceived-as-slutty lifestyle.
Which is why I see it as being about as morally defensible a position as wanting to force people to go to church against their will. Heck, I personally could accept a first-amendment argument against them - they are using a government-licenced position to restrict and oppose lifestyles contraindicated by their religion; they are using their government-licenced position to enforce the policies of their religion on their customers. And this is legal now?
How does this compare with OTC meds, especially ones with lots of warnings like cold or allergy meds?
The other groups in question are gone, or changed drastically. The US government doesn’t follow the law of the Roman empire, nor is it a continuation of the RE; so the Roman Empire’s behavior has nothing to do with it. But Christianity has a consistent 2000+ year history of being against women.
In other words, I’m right so you’ll try to distract from that by calling me a “one trick pony” instead of arguing.