The science and art of preparing and standardizing drugs and dispensing them to the public is called pharmacy. Pharmacy encompasses many fields, including pharmacology—the broad science concerned with the sources of drugs, their physical and chemical properties, their actions in the body, and their use in the treatment of disease—and toxicology—the study of drugs’ adverse, or toxic, effects. Those who practice pharmacy are pharmacists—also called chemists, dispensing chemists, apothecaries, or druggists, depending on the country in which they practice.
Pharmacy is an ancient science. The physician-priests of ancient Egypt were divided into two classes: those who visited the sick and those who gathered and prepared the treatments. The Ebers Papyrus, compiled about 1500 bc, is the one of the oldest known pharmaceutical records, which contained more than 700 prescriptions.
An ancient Chinese compendium described 365 remedies. It distinguished herbs with medicinal properties from those that were poisonous and laid the foundation for the practice of Chinese herbal medicine.
Practitioners of pharmacy in ancient Japan were highly respected. When ranked positions were established in the 700s, pharmacists and their assistants were assigned a status superior to all other health care practitioners, including physicians and acupuncturists.
The first-century Greek physician Pedanius Dioscorides produced a five-volume treatise on medicines derived from plants, minerals, and animals—among them, milk, honey, cannabis, peppermint, mercury, arsenic, calcium, and opium. This treatise, De materia medica, served as an authoritative text on drugs through the 15th century.
During the early Middle Ages in Europe, doctors often filled their own prescriptions; in Spain, however, which was influenced by Arab culture, pharmacists’ and physicians’ duties were largely distinct. In the Arabic world, pharmacists were highly educated. Their role was to choose the highest quality substances and prepare them with utmost precision, thereby providing the tools with which physicians healed their patients. In about ad 754, the first apothecary shop was established in Baghdad, an event that marked a firm division of the professions of pharmacy and medicine.
Public pharmacies first appeared in Europe in the 1100s. Over the next several centuries, the practice of pharmacy was increasingly governed by laws meant to ensure that drugs were of high quality.
After the American Revolution, many European pharmacists opened pharmacies in the United States. In 1821 the country’s first pharmacy college was founded in Philadelphia.
The pharmaceutical industry burgeoned after World War II. With the availability of manufactured drugs, pharmacists’ traditional role of compounding drugs—mixing them from raw ingredients (usually with a mortar and pestle)—diminished, and their function became one of accurately processing prescribers’ orders.
The United States Pharmacopeia (USP) was founded in 1820 as a nongovernmental authority to establish criteria for the strength and purity of commonly used medicinal products. It evolved into the official standards-setting authority for all prescription (ethical) drugs and nonprescription (proprietary) drugs, as well as other health care products manufactured or sold in the country. More than 130 other countries rely on USP standards, and a product’s meeting those standards is globally viewed as assurance of high quality. The USP publishes its standards for drugs in two compendia, the United States Pharmacopeia and the National Formulary; the former provides detailed information on all active drug substances, while the latter covers inactive ingredients.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), an agency within the Department of Health and Human Services, is responsible for assuring the safety, effectiveness, and security of human drugs taken by millions of Americans. (The agency also oversees veterinary drugs, biological products, medical devices, the country’s food supply, cosmetics, and products that emit radiation.) It rigorously evaluates all new prescription and over-the-counter (OTC) drugs before they are approved for marketing and serves as a consumer watchdog for the more than 10,000 drugs on the market.
In the United States, pharmacy is the third largest of the health professions—after nursing and medicine. In 2006, there were about 243,000 practicing pharmacists, a number projected to grow to 305,000 by 2020 and to 368,000 by 2030. In order to become a pharmacist, one must earn a doctor of pharmacy (Pharm.D.) degree from an accredited college of pharmacy, which typically involves four years of study. In 2009 there were 102 schools in the United States with accredited pharmacy programs. To practice pharmacy, graduates must pass state licensing exams.
Pharmacists work in many settings, including community pharmacies, hospitals, nursing homes, assisted living facilities, home health care, managed care organizations, and mail-order pharmacies. The pharmaceutical industry employs pharmacists in manufacturing, research, quality control, sales, and marketing.
About two thirds of pharmacists work in community pharmacies (either independently owned or part of drugstore chains, supermarkets, or large discount department stores). In addition to accurately processing prescribers’ orders, community pharmacists counsel patients on the proper use of medications. As drug therapies became more complex, the pharmacist’s role as patient advocate expanded, and filling prescriptions included actively screening them for errors that might result in harm to a patient.
Community pharmacists also explain the correct use of OTC drugs and help consumers with the choice and appropriate use of health care equipment such as blood pressure monitors and blood sugar testing supplies. Beginning in 2003, pharmacists were required by law to protect the privacy of customers’ health information to the fullest.
Some pharmacists are trained to administer annual flu shots and other vaccines. Further, pharmacists had been designated leading players with the responsibility of providing mass immunizations in the event of a bioterrorist attack or pandemic influenza outbreak.
Hospitals employ about one quarter of pharmacists, who work in an interdisciplinary fashion with physicians and nurses to determine appropriate drug therapy for patients during hospitalization and upon discharge home. Their responsibilities include obtaining and maintaining supplies of drugs and making sure controlled substances (medications with a high potential for abuse, such as narcotics) are properly accounted for. In most hospitals, pharmacists are aided by automated (robotic) medication storage and dispensing systems.
Hospital pharmacists prepare sterile solutions for intravenously administered drugs and have expertise in intravenous nutritional support. Some have specialty certification in oncology pharmacy (involving complex cancer chemotherapy regimens) and nuclear pharmacy (working with radioactive drugs used in diagnosis and therapy).
The U.S. Department of Labor predicted that the need for pharmacists would grow by 22 percent between 2006 and 2016, largely to meet the needs of a rapidly aging population. Older people have more health problems and use more prescription medications than younger people, and as a result of physiological changes that accompany the aging process, they metabolize and respond to drugs differently and are at greater risk of adverse drug reactions, including drug-drug interactions.
Since the implementation of the Medicare Modernization Act in 2006, the majority of Americans aged 65 and older got their medications through Medicare Part D prescription drug plans. Those plans were required to offer “medication therapy management” services aimed at helping beneficiaries avoid drug-related problems and receive optimal benefit from their medications. Community pharmacists with expertise in geriatric drug use were the main providers of those services.
Prescription medications are the most common form of treatment of disease. In 2008 in the United States alone, 3.54 billion prescriptions were filled, amounting to $254 billion in sales. The benefits of prescription medications are unquestionable—they cure infections, alleviate symptoms, control chronic diseases, improve quality of life, and save lives. During the 1990s and early 2000s, dozens of life-prolonging medications for HIV/AIDS were developed; their use cut the AIDS death rate by 70 percent and transformed the once devastating disease into a manageable one.
Numerous studies have shown that drugs not only improve health but also reduce overall health care costs. One found that the effective use of medications in people with type 2 diabetes produced health care savings of $685 to $950 per patient within two years of the initiation of therapy. Another study predicted that use of blood-thinning drugs in appropriate patients could prevent 40,000 strokes and save $600 million annually—not to mention the savings in human suffering.
A report issued by the Institute of Medicine in 2006 estimated that medication errors harmed at least 1.5 million Americans every year. With estimates that four out of five U.S. adults take at least one medication a week and almost a third take five or more, it should not be surprising that medication errors are common. Those errors can occur at any stage in the drug-prescribing/drug-taking process—e.g., prescribers’ handwritten prescriptions may be illegible, their directions for a drug’s use may be unclear, or they may prescribe the wrong dosage; pharmacists may misread prescribers’ handwriting and dispense the wrong drug or dosage; and patients may take too little or too much of a drug, take it at the wrong time, stop taking it too soon, or not take it all.
Drugs with look-alike/sound-alike names are an important cause of patients receiving the wrong drug. Examples of drugs with easily confused names are Celebrex (a painkiller) and Celexa (an antidepressant), Lamactil (an antiepileptic) and Lamisil (an antifungal), and Zyrtec (an OTC antihistamine for allergies) and Zantac (an OTC antacid). The FDA rejects about one third of proposed names for new drugs because of their similarity to other names and the potential for dangerous, even deadly, mix-ups.
An emerging solution to medication errors is electronic prescribing (e-prescribing), a method that allows health care providers to transmit accurate prescriptions by computer directly to a pharmacy. E-prescribing systems vary, but the most advanced are backed by decision-support technology. At the time of prescribing, the prescriber has access to vital information about the patient’s health and medication history, is guided in the choice of drugs, and learns which drugs are covered by the patient’s insurance plan.
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 allocated $19 billion over two years to modernize the nation’s health information technology infrastructure and included financial incentives for health care providers to adopt electronic health records and e-prescribing. At the time of the bill’s passage, fewer than 20 percent of U.S. physicians kept electronic medical records or utilized e-prescribing. It was predicted, however, that more than 75 percent would adopt e-prescribing by 2014 and 90 percent would do so by 2018; as a result, 3.5 million serious medication errors would be prevented over 10 years.
On average, in the 2000s, the FDA approved 33 new drugs a year. Discovering, developing, and testing a new pharmaceutical takes an average of 12 to 15 years and costs more than $800 million. Once a new drug is approved, the company that holds the patent on it has exclusive rights to sell it, usually for less than 15 years. The way pharmaceutical companies recoup their investment is by charging high prices; consequently, drug prices in the United States are among the highest in the world. By contrast, European countries and Canada have universal health care systems under which governments negotiate and place caps on the prices of medications.
After a drug’s patent expires, other companies may produce and sell generic versions—unbranded drugs that are chemically equivalent to the original. Because generic drugs are substantially cheaper than their brand-name counterparts, insurers encourage patients to use them, and some health plans mandate that pharmacists fill prescriptions with the least expensive option. A study found that from 1999 to 2008, the increasing use of generic medications resulted in savings to the U.S. health care system of more than $730 billion.
With increasing frequency, consumers were purchasing drugs over the Internet. Having prescriptions filled by reputable Internet pharmacies offered consumers convenience and sometimes saved them money. On the other hand, many rogue sites sold prescription drugs, including controlled substances with a high potential for abuse, to customers without a valid prescription—a practice the FDA strongly condemned.
In the late 2000s, Internet sales of counterfeit drugs—fake, or copycat, medicines containing contaminated or poor-quality ingredients or no active ingredients at all—constituted a growing threat to the public health. With international sales of fake drugs exceeding $3.5 billion a year, the FDA, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, the World Health Organization, and other agencies were actively collaborating to crack down on counterfeiters. (See also disease, human, “How Drugs Fight Disease”; drugs; medicine.)