Number-One Pharmacist Recommended

Some drugs are being marketed with the claim that they are the number-one recommendation of pharmacists. This is unfortunate. A minority of pharmacists have received additional training in clinical pharmacy and provide direct patient care as part of a team of health care providers managing complex cases. Most pharmacists have not had such training and are not competent to recommend drugs, much less to pontificate about “number-one” drugs. We get our prescriptions and our health care advice from medical doctors and other licensed health care providers, not from pharmacists. Pharmacists can’t be trusted to provide science-based medical advice; after all, most pharmacies sell homeopathic remedies.

The marketing doesn’t specify clinical pharmacists, and even if it did, it would not be accurate. The advertising doesn’t give us crucial information that we would need to decide if the claim were trustworthy. How many pharmacists were consulted? How were they chosen? Were they given free choice or were they asked to choose one of three predetermined options? What question were they asked exactly? How many pharmacists disagreed and recommended a different drug? How many of them also recommended homeopathic remedies? Were the “number-one” recommendations based on patient demand, price, profit, convenience, spiffy packaging, or other factors not related to efficacy?

When deciding what drug to take, popularity polls are irrelevant, whether they involve pharmacists or anyone else. We only need the facts; we need to know what well-designed scientific studies have shown about the effectiveness and safety of the drugs. Untested “memory supplements” and “brain supplements” such as Neuriva are being hawked by spokespersons such as the actress Mayim Bialik, who is a neuroscientist and says she thinks the supporting science is strong. It isn’t.

The bottom line: medical decisions should be based on science, not popularity polls.

The next time you see “Number-One Pharmacist Recommended” or celebrity endorsements, I hope you will just disregard them. In fact, it might be a reason to avoid that product. If they had a safe, effective product that could stand on its own merits (like, for instance, penicillin), they wouldn’t be tempted to resort to such shenanigans.

Harriet Hall

Harriet Hall, MD, a retired Air Force physician and flight surgeon, writes and educates about pseudoscientific and so-called alternative medicine. She is a contributing editor and frequent contributor to the Skeptical Inquirer and contributes to the blog Science-Based Medicine. She is author of Women Aren’t Supposed to Fly: Memoirs of a Female Flight Surgeon and coauthor of the 2012 textbook Consumer Health: A Guide to Intelligent Decisions.