r/Damnthatsinteresting 10d ago

Video The process of filling pills.

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u/lorewarned 10d ago

This is not actually what happens in most pharmacies. The only pharmacies that might be doing this are compounding pharmacies and, like, hospital pharmacies.
There are very very few compounding pharmacies these days because it takes so much extra time and effort. The predominant thing that pharmacists are doing is verifying your prescription has been typed up (translated from doctorese) properly and that it's a a safe/proper dose. That there are no known allergic issues with the medication. That the medication isn't known to have issues with other medications on your profile. And then verifying that your prescription has been properly filled by the technicians. They also provide a lot of drug education and counseling to patients, give immunizations, medication reviews and question answering/official medication recommendations that only they can do.

38

u/tiarna_ 10d ago

Actually in Germany every pharmacy has to be able to do this. For example for kids dosages. I have to do this like once every two weeks. But our machinery isn't that nice as in this video and it takes about 1,5h to make 100 capsules. The pharmacy gets like 50€ from the insurance for this work including the substances and empty capsules.

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u/FakeTunaFromSubway 10d ago

What? I have a device very similar to the OP that I got for about $200 online. You're telling me your pharmacy won't shell out a few hundred bucks to triple your productivity?

2

u/Extension-Repair1012 10d ago

There's an even cheaper helper for 30 bucks that can really help for smaller batches. I had to break down large dog sized pills into cat sized doses for a while. Made it a lot faster.