littlegreenfootballs.com

Birth Control Works posted an article about relaxing restrictions on prescribing certain birth control medications in New Mexico: Specifically, the new regulations allow pharmacists to prescribe them in certain cases, alleviating extra steps and cost in seeing a physician for those prescriptions.

I do not know the incidence of adverse effects of various birth control medications (I assume they are low), as I am not a woman nor do I play one on television.

In respect to cost, time, and fewer hoops to jump through I see this as good.

In the event of adverse effects (if there are any), I see a problem here, as I had to deal with a similar problem in a VA emergency room where a pain medication was prescribed to me that had a black-box warning for epilepsy. I only found out about it when I got home because I looked up the medication on-line and found the warning.

A pharmacist does not necessarily have access to a customer’s medical records, so contraindications for a medication directly prescribed by the pharmacist could go unnoticed.

As I mentioned, I don’t know the incidence of adverse reactions to BC so I could be citing a concern with little merit. In my own case with the pain med, it was because I looked it up myself before taking the drug. I imagine most people just assume that the pharmacist is not going to make a mistake even though the pharmacist has no access to medical records.