Why not just ask a pharmacist for advice?

I have just watched the BBC programme ‘The truth about your medicine cabinet’, which was a fairly entertaining exposé (in the loosest sense of the term). I found it strange that the nation needs a 60-minute programme to tell us what people could have discovered if they had simply walked into a pharmacy and asked a pharmacist’s advice on treating their minor symptoms. Instead, the programme insinuates that, as a nation, we appear to be wandering aimlessly around supermarkets and service stations picking up the brightest coloured boxes and inadvertently overdosing ourselves and our loved ones. If nothing else, the BBC have shown me why the pharmacy medicine category is so important and why pharmacists’ advice is needed more than ever.

Andrew Grierson

Rossendale, Lancashire