I was very interested in Flanigan’s argument about prescription requirements, as I have never questioned our country’s prescription laws, but I do not agree with her argument.\u00a0 I think prescription laws are actually very important because they act as boundaries that stop the abuse of medicines.\u00a0 In her argument, she uses the example of a man who has diabetes and his doctor prescribes him with diet and exercise but the man wants to use insulin instead but cannot obtain it without the doctor’s prescription.\u00a0 While in this case, the man should have access to insulin even though it wasn’t his doctor’s first treatment choice, if we took away prescription laws, then people not diagnosed with diabetes could have access to it.\u00a0 Similarly, with Adderall and other ADHD medicines, if we took away prescription laws then these medicines would become so much more widely abused.\u00a0 Even replacing prescription laws with a “behind the counter” rule would not stop the problem of abuse because we have several medications like this in the U.S. which must be sold behind the counter and you must be 18 or older to buy them, but that is the only qualification.\u00a0 If Adderall was sold behind counters for anyone 18 and older to buy, almost every student on college campuses would be using them.\u00a0 Furthermore, prescriptions are important because they allow physicians to determine what dose of the medicine you need.\u00a0 If we sold prescriptions as “behind the counter” medicines then people might also start taking prescriptions that are too strong which would also be dangerous.\u00a0 I agree with Flanigan that if we are diagnosed with a disease or condition that we should have access to all possible treatment options, whether they be prescription or not, I think that the access to prescription medicines should stop there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I was very interested in Flanigan’s argument about prescription requirements, as I have never questioned our country’s prescription laws, but I do not agree with her argument.\u00a0 I think prescription laws are actually very important because they act as boundaries that stop the abuse of medicines.\u00a0 In her argument, she uses the example of a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4680,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5005","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reading-responses"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5005","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4680"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5005"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5005\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5005"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5005"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5005"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}