Comment
Author: Admin | 2025-04-28
Buy to treat a particular ailment, thereby summoning the old form of "over-the-counter prescription."Conclusions (added on December 4, 2022)My answer attempts to distinguish between "prescribing over the counter" and "selling over the counter." The goal of the proposed Chemists and Druggists Act of 1865 was evidently not to forbid pharmacists to sell potentially hazardous drugs over the counter to a customer who had received a prescription for them from a qualified physician, but rather to forbid pharmacists to prescribe such drugs—or to recommend other treatments in a manner that amounted to "practising medicine"—over the counter. The actual sale—the physical exchange of money for drugs "over the counter"—would of course be the same, regardless of the source of the prescription.I see a fundamental distinction between (on the one hand) drugs prescribed in a medical office or at a patient's home by a doctor but sold over the counter by a pharmacist and (on the other hand) drugs prescribed by a pharmacist in a pharmacy and sold over the counter by that pharmacist. The latter, I think, is what Mr. Collins has in mind in talking about prescribing over the counter. He further tries to distinguish between "prescribing any simple remedy over the counter" and prescribing treatments requiring professional medical expertise over the counter—what he calls "to prescribe in the strict sense of the word over the counter."The acceptable subset of "simple remedy" treatments that (according to Mr. Collins) ought to be within a pharmacist's rights to prescribe "over the counter" may well have included, in 1865, any number of simple drugs that were not prepackaged for off-the-shelf purchase. Over time, however, as prepackaged drugs and other medicines became the norm for "simple remedies," the term "over the counter" seems to have migrated from the prescription to the prepackaged product itself.Even so, the old distinction between "prescribing by a physician" and "prescribing over the counter [by a pharmacist]" might help explain why people today divide pharmaceutical drugs into "over-the-counter drugs" (those that can be purchased off the shelf, without a doctor's prescription) and "prescription drugs" (those that must be specially bottled by the pharmacist and sold only to buyers who have a doctor's prescription for them), despite the fact that the pharmacist ultimately sells both types of drugs to customers over a counter.
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