papalonian @ papalonian @lemmy.world

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39

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1,659

Joined

2 yr. ago

Don't give any customer your "trash pile". Either take the time to do it right, or throw away the trashpile, or accept that customers feels like people are saying they feel.

... You have to give someone the trash pile. Technicians are not going to throw away thousands of dollars of pills a month because the packaging is "MILDLY" frustrating. Your comment reads like a preachy teenager who has all the answers to every problem.

I don't know why you're trying to tell me how to do my job when a. you've very clearly never done anything remotely adjacent to it and b. Ive said that I don't even do that job anymore.

In order to remedy this "MILDLY" frustrating problem that happens every so often, the entire distribution network of drugs in the US would need to be reworked from the ground up to start dispensing per-patient packages. Which, if you think that's the most pressing problem the US medical industry needs to fix... One, I've got a bridge to sell you, and two, don't make up excuses, do it right, get it changed, become a technician and start throwing away pills and refusing to fill people's scripts with loose blister packs... Be the change you want to see and all that.

What do you do with expired meds, does the pharmacy eat the loss?

It depends. In the US we have "prescription only" medication (things like antibiotics, diabetes meds, etc) as well as "controlled" medication (things like Norco, Xanax, morphine). With my former employer, we would go through the pharmacy and find non-controlled medication that was due to expire soon (3 or 6 months, I don't remember) and send them back to our wholesaler for a partial credit. Packages had to be whole and unopened. With controlled medication, there is no sending back; the pharmacy holds the medication until it is actually expired, then sends it to be disposed of.

Do you mix and match pills with different expiration dates to fill a prescription? From different manufacturers?

Different expiration dates, yes, different manufacturers, generally no but if there's no better option we would. In the US we generally fill from stock bottles containing several hundred or thousand pills, so one bottle can last a few months worth of prescriptions. When we go from one bottle to the next, the expiration dates between the two generally won't be the same. When I left the company, we had a system that scanned the bottle we used and could read the expiration date; if the med expired in over a year, the label printed would just have an expiration date of 1 year from the current date. If it expired in less than 1 year, it would give a notification, and we'd manually enter the exact expiration date on the label.

I'm sorry, I can't continue this conversation. It's clear that you're just kind of saying things that sound right. Your only argument is, "the pills themselves cost nothing to make" while ignoring everything that makes the pill cost money. Economics and cost analysis does not work that way. And in 7 years of working in a pharmacy, never once have we ever sent incomplete strips of meds to the manufacturer to get a complete pack. That is just not a thing that happens anywhere on a regular enough basis for it to be taken into consideration.

Yes, a sterile lab is expensive, but like normal business expensive. It's very achievable to build, drug cartels manage it just fine.

This bit right here told me that I didn't need to take this too seriously. An actual medical lab is not comparable to cocaine plants in the Congo.

But the pills themselves? The materials and production cost is cents. They themselves cost basically nothing

This is the exact same point from the previous comment. You cannot just look at the material cost of something and say, "see? It only costs cents to make." Go buy a part that goes in a car engine - it's just a few cents worth of metal! But, you can't just take a hunk of metal and magically form it into car parts, there's a manufacturing process and it's expensive. That's part of where the cost comes from. It doesn't matter if you can make the most expensive pill in the world out of 10 cents of flour if you need a $10 million dollar assembly line to process it and turn it in to what is useful. They aren't just taking a premade substance and pressing it into pills, there's numerous chemical reactions and processes taking place.

That's why other countries can afford to sell them for cents - they really are that cheap to make

You start your comment off with saying that R&D is subsidized, and end with saying "other places can sell them for cheap cuz they really are that cheap." In these other countries, the drug company is not selling the medication directly to the public for pennies, it's getting subsidized by the government to make it affordable for citizens. Granted the government is not paying US cash prices, but companies simply are not selling direct to consumers for 10x less than other places.

Look, this is coming from someone who fucking hates the predatory medical industry, especially that of the US. I used to work as a very small cog in it. There are absolutely places where prices are disgustingly manipulated and people are taken complete advantage of. Things exist today the way they are because of corporate greed and the continuance of putting profit over people. We can accept all of this as true, and still recognize that producing drugs at a medical grade, with medical levels of consistency and purity, is a difficult, expensive task that requires resources to accomplish. Medication needs to be cheaper (it's my belief that it should be no direct cost to the user), but momentum is instantly removed from the cause when we use arguments based on a limited grasp of reality.

The expensive part is all markup

So we can waste the pills if we find a way to keep all the markup safe?

Also the idea that pills costs "cents to make" is pretty flawed. Even if you ignore all of the R&D money that goes in to making newer pills, the sterilized environment they need to be manufactured in is gonna jack the cost up too.

It's like saying a cup of fresh, ice cold water that you're getting handed to you in the middle of the desert is only "a few cents worth of water". Yeah, but the fact that it exists in the middle of the desert for you to consume is what made it a "precious resource".

That looks like he got the left-over-pile after a day of ever order getting from a new pack.

I'm saying that's exactly what happened.

Never been to US though.

Things are done very, very differently here than most places. Blister packs are pretty uncommon, as are "per-patient" packages.

We rarely get bottles of 14, 30, 90 or whatever to give to the patient. It's usually a giant "stock bottle" of like, 100, 500, 1000 pills that get counted out according to the prescription.

Your example of using the leftover from one script to the next works if you're a single person in a small-ish pharmacy and it's an uncommon drug, but when you're one of 4 techs in a shitty retail pharmacy, you're not going to ask every other person if they have a 2x2 strip of this med in their pile of go-backs, or spend time min-maxing the most efficient way to get the most pills in the least amount of strips. You're gonna fill the thing as quickly as possible, because the medicine is what's important, and you're not gonna hold the backlog of prescriptions up because someone wants the nice complete pack of 10 and not the leftovers that are bound to pile up.

Uh, former pharmacy tech here... I don't know what you want us to do. If I have a strip of, say, 10 pills, 2 rows of 5, and I get a prescription for 6 pills, that means I'm gonna have a strip of 4 pills left over. If I get a prescription for 9 pills, there's gonna be a single one left over. Do you want these pills to just be thrown away? If they don't have enough pills on hand to make your prescription with the full sheet, would you rather they delay your prescription so they can order some nicer looking ones?

I get that it can be frustrating dealing with those blister packs, but freaking out at the pharmacist/ tech that a. did not put the pills in a blister pack and b. doesn't have any option but to dispense medication on hand, seems pretty misplaced. Like, I wouldn't think something was wrong with the Walmart cashier for selling me a pair of scissors in security packaging.

And videos with still images of text with an animated clip-art border and sound use even more!

Hey, nice fix.

Only thing I'd look at is maybe adding a slope to the little protruding rectangle, so the model can be printed on its front/ back side without supports or losing quality on the first few layers of the notch. Based on the complete photo, it looks like only the lower side of the rectangle that's resting on the monitor needs to be there, you can make that a small angled lip instead of the block.

Melon Muckerburger

There is a keyhole on the right side of the door; I wonder if it is locked, and if so, if OP would be given the key (or at least a specific book) upon request.

Are you in the wrong comment thread?

I went on a canyon drive one time. We started with 7 cars, when we got to the end of our route, we had 8. Hopped right out of his car and stood around in the circle with the rest of us, didn't even register for a second that it was just some random guy. He thought it looked fun so he kept up with us. Cool dude.

What if the aggressor misses, and stabs the wrong one?

We don't.

Why change perfection?

I'm not sure I understand how other countries formerly thinking the US is "cool" has anything to do with Philadelphia being recognized as an American name or not.

That's like Hank Hill finding out that Bob Strickland uses an electric oven.

I really like round corners with a small radius. Just a handful of pixels so the corner isn't a perfect square, barely noticeable but feels smoother to me. When Windows start to look like app icons, that's too far.

I honestly think they lose respect for me

We do.

I know it's incorrect, and an unfair assumption, but whenever I see someone using light mode for anything, I assume it's because they don't know how to change it.

There's a 0% chance the tiktok generation avoids using nukes on itself.

As much as we hate the 'old guard' and as much damage as they continue to do to the world, in a way they are protecting us.

There is no way the tiktok/instagram/twitter generation has enough foresight and appreciation for human life to avoid pushing the nuclear button when they're in control.

Can you point out the parts that aren't about generations? Because the first paragraph is a single sentence about "the Tok Tok generation", the second paragraph is a single sentence about the "old guard" generation, and the last paragraph is, well, a single sentence about the "Tik Tok / Instagram / Twitter generation".

You're correct, there are in fact other words in your post besides "generation", but all three sentences are literally only about how the next generation is too XYZ compared to the previous one.

Telling people to read your post again while giving zero additional context doesn't make everyone else go, "wow that guy is so dumb for not understanding the clearly written post! OP is smart and cool!" it just kind of proves to everyone that you're talking out of your ass and can't explain your position.