Category: 2005

Pharmacists’ moral acumen
2006-04-24

One of the more interesting and underrepresented facts about many women’s health providers — places that are routinely targeted because they provide low- or no-cost birth control for women, as well as access to abortions — is that they often offer other health services, such as flu shots and general health exams.

Sometimes, antibiotics are prescribed.

Most of these clinics don’t have on-site pharmacies, so it is up to the patient to go elsewhere to have the prescription filled.

Or, as was the case with a patient from the Cedar Rivers Clinic, which has facilities in Renton, Tacoma and Yakima, Wash., the prescription is called into a pharmacy for pickup.

Unfortunately, in May 2005, a pharmacist at the Swedish Medical Center outpatient pharmacy took it upon him or herself to decide it was morally unacceptable to receive antibiotics from a clinic that provides access to birth control and abortion, and refused to fill the prescription.

That’s right. A pharmacy refused to fill a prescription based on who prescribed it.

“Well maybe,” you try to rationalize to yourself, “the pharmacist believed that it was an abortion-related complication and they felt complicit?” Ignoring the logic behind that, which basically says that someone deserves an infection, let’s move to another example.

At a Safeway in Yakima, Wash., a pharmacist refused to fill pregnancy-related vitamins for a pregnant woman who was receiving healthcare from Cedar River Clinic. This is a woman who was making an active effort to have a healthy pregnancy.

The Safeway pharmacist reportedly repeatedly quizzed the woman why she needed the pills (seems obvious to you and me, eh?), and then launched into why she was going there.

There.

As if the woman should be castigated for receiving healthcare for her pregnancy.

My friends know that I often play devil’s advocate for pharmacists who decline filling Plan B or chemical abortificant prescriptions on moral grounds.

My reasoning for this is that in some ways you can argue that the filling of these prescriptions does directly force the pharmacist to participate in the providing of a service they morally oppose — what they view, rightly or otherwise, to be abortions.

We do not force doctors to perform abortions on women who want them, and I think it’s reasonable to extend this logic to pharmacists.

But these pharmacy moral-police are overstepping their boundaries when they begin denying prescriptions based on who writes them.

If a pharmacist decides he or she has the moral acumen to decide if someone should or should not have access to antibiotics, what’s next?

Denying someone their AIDS cocktail?

Refusing to fill someone’s prescription for methadone, since maybe they’re lying about having chronic pain and they’re really a heroin user in recovery?

Maybe these morally righteous pharmacists will determine that you shouldn’t have access to any “Class II drugs,” or that you’ll need to provide documentation of your illness before they release the prescription to you.

The potential nightmares can be spun out for a while.

Thankfully, the Washington State Pharmacy Board realizes the potential for abuse, while also recognizing the right of the pharmacist to conscientiously object to some prescriptions, such as Plan B.

Late last week, the board released its first draft of a new rule outlining a pharmacist’s right to refuse prescriptions.

While the exact wording of the rule remains uncertain as it undergoes further revision, so far the indications have been pretty clear: Pharmacists have the right to a conscientious clause only so long as there is another pharmacist on site or closely nearby who can fill the contested prescription.

Which is how it should be. Pharmacists dispense medicine, they don’t practice it.

Green pigs and ham
Publish Date: 2006-04-03

Although only their shells are green, the Araucana chicken has brought us green eggs for years. But until now, our ham has been a nice, hammy shade of pink.

No more — these days, even our pigs can be turned green.

While it’s not new, per se, the jellyfish pigs — so called because they have the glowing jellyfish protein inserted into their genetic material while still embryos — have been in the news again lately for two reasons.

The first is the “achievement,” announced in January by Taiwanese researchers, of the creation of jellyfish pigs that glow, inside and out. From snout to eyes to liver and heart, these oinkers are fluorescent green through and through.

The second scientific announcement came March 26, in the online edition of the journal Nature Biotechnology (the print copy will be released this month). A group of scientists from Harvard Medical School, the University of Missouri and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center have created five tiny white piglets whose muscle tissue is “larded” with omega-3 fatty acids.

Almost anyone can tell you that omega-3 fatty acids are typically associated with fish, and believed to be “heart-healthy” — to lower cholesterol and help prevent cardiovascular disease.

While it hasn’t yet been concretely shown that these fatty acids will survive from pig to table, the hope is they will, so that a “healthy” version of bacon and other pork products can be produced.

If the genetically modified pigs do retain their omega-3 fatty acids, the researchers have plans to expand beyond pigs, creating cows who produce the fatty acids in their milk to chickens laying fatty-acid-enhanced eggs (now to simply get Araucana chickens to do this).

And why is this a good thing?

Well, as reported in The New York Times, Alexander Leaf, professor emeritus of clinical medicine at Harvard, said that genetically modified pork and other foods with omega-3 fatty acids would eventually get to the consumer, and “people can continue to eat their junk food … you won’t have to change your diet, but you will be getting what you need.”

But the problems with diet and obesity in this country will not be solved by changing the genetic content of the food we eat; as the Snackwell craze proved several years back, it doesn’t matter if food is labeled healthy, or non-fat — if you regularly eat a box of Snackwells in one sitting, you’re going to gain weight.

Likewise, changing the makeup of a pig isn’t going to mean you can suddenly eat all the bacon in the world and never gain weight or have any problems.

Regular bacon is bad to eat in massive amounts — the key is not genetically modifying pigs to produce omega-3 fatty acids. The key is learning to eat in moderation.

As Queen Latifah so eloquently said on The Daily Show last Thursday, “Don’t mess with bacon!”

If you want to eat healthy bacon, have turkey bacon.

While it is hard to argue against the lifesaving potential of some genetically modified organisms, especially those that will help relieve famine and create disease tolerant plants (and potentially animals) in Third World countries, that is not the case here.

We’re deluding ourselves if we think that the key to managing our health is in managing and modifying the genomes of the food we eat.

I do not like green pigs and ham, I do not like it, Kelly I am. I do not like them here or there, I do not like GMOs anywhere.