childrenshealthdefense.org In 2005, people stopped taking Sudafed, the over-the-counter nasal decongestant that regulators had made more difficult to obtain, and started taking its replacement, Sudafed PE. “They would buy it, and they would take it home,” said Randy Hatton, who at the time ran the Drug Information and Pharmacy Resource Center hotline. “And then they’d go back to their pharmacist and say, ‘That stuff doesn’t work. What’s wrong? It doesn’t work.’”
By Peter Andrey Smith
Randy Hatton ran the hotline. His students fielded dozens of drug-related questions from pharmacists, physicians and even the occasional vet. When the phones rang, Hatton and his team never knew what to expect.
One time, surgeons dropped part of a patient’s skull on the floor and wanted to know what solution would sterilize the bone chunk before they put it back in.
Another time, veterinarians called to ask how big a dose of human antibiotics to inject into an African elephant. But then, Hatton, himself a pharmacist, got a question that sparked a 20-year quest over a seemingly benign drug: a popular over-the-counter decongestant.
Known as the Drug Information and Pharmacy Resource Center, the hotline was founded in 1972 at the University of Florida in Gainesville.
By the mid-2000s, the center had cubicles and functioned as a 9-to-5 training lab for students. (In an era of dial-up and limited internet access, Paul Doering, the center’s former co-director, said, “We were king of the world because we could find stuff.”)
Although practitioners could query online databases like PubMed for answers, when they came up short, they put in a call to the hotline. As such, the center tended to get hard questions.
…
Read Full Article Here… | Children’s Health Defense
Home | Caravan to Midnight (zutalk.com)
Be First to Comment