Today is very different from the 1980s when I trained and practiced as a young physician. In those early days, I had access to antipyretics, antibiotics, anti-inflammatories and other medications in my home medicine cabinet and I also had any local pharmacy at my beck and call. No more.
Since those days, legal controls have been imposed demanding that any practitioner prescribing to anyone must fulfill a number of clinical prerequisites. I can’t call a prescription in for my sick spouse or child without documenting a comprehensive clinical encounter that justifies the prescription. Violate that edict, and my professional license is on the line – even for something as innocuous as a topical steroid. The message from the medical board is a clear, “don’t fuck with us.”
It has been decades since I prescribed anything for myself, my family or my friends. I have accommodated the new ethos just as almost all of my peers have. Still, there are many potent and useful agents available to all of us over the counter (OTC). In our home, we have H-2 blocker antacids, topical antifungals, oral and topical anti-inflammatory medicines, topical steroids, and so on.
Tonight, I watched just a bit of Meet the Press with Chuck Todd. He interviewed a right-wingnut Congressman who attacked Biden and Democrats because of our economy’s inflation headwinds and other issues that he attributed to immigration, a porous border, and other RWNJ talking points. I felt a sudden and intense wave of nausea. Alas, I have no antiemetics in my home medicine apothecary. Shit!
If I had a stash of Phenergan, it would probably be in suppository form, and I would prefer to put it into the rectum of this RWNJ than take it myself. I have survived many episodes of puking these past 73 years, and I would happily endure another if only to place a jolly rectum rocket in this moron’s butthole.