Internal and emergency medicine
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Pharmacy has been historically regarded as a discipline between health and chemistry devoted to drug development, production, and compounding. These tasks have been almost lost with the industrial manufacturing, and dispensing remains the main activity of pharmacists. Hospital pharmacists are usually employees in their workplace, while the professional framework of community pharmacists is very different, being pharmacies predominantly private shops in almost all European countries. ⋯ To depict a realistic scenario for progress, it is worth differentiating between hospital and community. Hospital pharmacists should strengthen their pivotal role of medication gatekeepers to improve among clinicians the appropriateness of drug prescriptions and generate savings in expenditures. Any proposal for clinical services provided by community pharmacists is inevitably affected by the issue of their potential remuneration, especially in countries where the remuneration for reimbursable drugs is still a proportion of the retail price.
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Letter Biography Historical Article
The death of Raphael: a reflection on bloodletting in the Renaissance.