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The industry
Medicines management
The Register
CPD
Supplements
Letters to the Editor
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Supplements
Educate the public by making supplements P medicines
From Mr P. M. W. Clarke, MRPharmS
For years, government advisers have been telling us that vitamins and
food supplements are harmless enough to be treated as normal items of
commerce and sold by anyone willing to stock them. At last they are now
saying that they may do more harm than good.
The fact that the products are not restricted to professional supervision
means that members of the public, understandably, do not take precautions,
and probably do not read the dosage leaflets .
Compared with most of the European Community governments across the channel,
where health in the public domain is considered paramount, we in the United
Kingdom take a laid-back, even careless, attitude, eg, mad cow disease,
foot and mouth disease, and failure to get all human over-the-counter
medicines regarded as a special category.
Many years ago, when I was in charge of a pharmacy, I
insisted that requests for an over-the-counter product, Entero-vioform,
were referred to me so that I could tell the customer about reports of
a serious ophthalmic side effect, subacute myelo-optico-neuropathy (SMON).
A couple of years later the product was banned. I did the same thing with
a type of vitamin supplement, high dose vitamin A in Sylvasun tan tablets.
These were banned too, eventually.
The way to educate the public about potent medicinal products, or at
least make them aware that they are not trivial, is by making them pharmacy
medicines and by not allowing the manufacturers and supermarkets, for
sheer commercial reasons, to get more and more medicines listed as “Grocery
Store Lines”.
P. M. W. Clarke
Saumur, France
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