Helping Hands for the Public Benefit of OTCs

Well, an FDA advisory panel this week rejected Merck's third application bid for a Rx-to-OTC switch of Mevacor (lovastatin) because, in Merck's studies on how consumers would respond the proposed labeling, a significant group of people, for whom taking Mevacor was a wrong decision, decided to take the drug.

Okay, I won't make a flip remark about how people frequently make wrong decisions about taking drugs. But I will note that we, in the US, are missing a major public health benefit, by not giving consumers/patients more access to these life-lengthening medicines.

Almost everywhere outside of our 50 united states, consumers/patients have the opportunity to seek advice from their pharmacists about some of their ills and those pharmacists have the ability to dispense medicines to them that were once prescription-only.

Are US pharmacists any less trained than those in Canada, the UK, France, Germany, Australia or Japan? I don't think so.

We already have a de facto third class of medicines in the US. That's what we have done by placing Nicotine-Replacement Therapy, Pseudoephedrine and Plan-B behind the counter. And we have done this without congressional legislation and with FDA approval.

If the pharmaceutical and consumer healthcare companies, public health advocates and the appropriate associations really cared for consumers and for the ability to provide life-lengthening medicines to the general populace surely a solution can be developed.

The precedents have already been established in the US. I have seen research that clearly demonstrates that, by lowering the existing barriers to access, consumers would welcome the opportunity to engage with their physicians and their pharmacists and to be more compliant and adherent with their medicines if they had easier ways to purchase their medicines.

Think about it: lower cholesterol, lower blood pressure, fewer severe migraines. Longer, more productive lives. If we can truly create the will, we can easily define and implement the way.